


What You See, You Might Not Get

by McSpot



Series: Herb's Electronics [2]
Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Bakery, Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Alternate Universe - Not Hockey Player(s), M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-12
Updated: 2018-05-12
Packaged: 2019-05-05 22:16:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 29,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14628155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/McSpot/pseuds/McSpot
Summary: Nobody knew why Carey moved to Nashville to become a full-time barista at a coffee shop and bakery.  Kuzya told everyone he was on the run from the French Canadian mob because they were intimidated by his “pretty face.”  Ben liked to tease that he was pursuing his life-long dream of making coffee for aspiring country singers.One of those theories was a little too accurate for Carey’s comfort.Or, how Carey Price fled his past, and his past chased after him.





	What You See, You Might Not Get

**Author's Note:**

> People kept asking me about what Carey's backstory was in Too Sweet to Be Sour, and my brain said, "Yeah, what _is_ Carey's story?" And then this happened. You don't have to have read the first fic to understand this one, but it sure would help. Thank you to scribetuesday for letting me throw ideas at you.
> 
> Things you will find in this fic: a convoluted lack of communication; evil mustache-twirling villains; a world where Rich Clune was never bought out by the Nashville Predators and the Predators weren't on a road trip over Halloween in 2016; Dramatic Emotional Decisions that don't make sense in the real world; unrealistic career paths (but that's not new); and enough angst to make a soap opera say it needs to be toned down a notch.
> 
> Title is a line from "Sabotage" by the Beastie Boys because now I'm going for a ~theme~.

Nobody knew why Carey moved to Nashville to become a full-time barista at a coffee shop and bakery. Kuzya told everyone he was on the run from the French Canadian mob because they were intimidated by his "pretty face." Ben liked to tease that he was pursuing his life-long dream of making coffee for aspiring country singers.

One of those theories was a little too accurate for Carey's comfort.

James and Paul surely had a few theories between the two of them, but they never said what they were. That was the unspoken deal Carey had with his employers: he never asked why they moved to Nashville, and they never asked him.

They all had their strange reasons for fleeing to Nashville, even Kuzya and Ben. Nashville was a good place to start over, as long as the things you were running from didn't include country music or cowboy hats.

Or, apparently, hockey, but Carey didn't think he could be blamed for expecting not to run into many hockey players in Tennessee, even if they did have a professional hockey team. Most people didn't look at Nashville and immediately think, "Yes, where all of the hockey players are."

But maybe they should have had that thought when they looked at Herb's Electronics.

When Carey had signed on to work as the morning barista at a bakery named after a long-defunct used electronics store, he was expecting it to be something like when he'd worked at Tim Horton's back in college, but with a wider selection of pastries and special order cakes and less people complaining about losing Roll Up the Rim.

It was a little bit like that when he started, though his manager at Tim Horton's had never been nearly as impressed by his ability to properly assemble a cappuccino as James was. He'd thought it would take him longer to get back into the swing of things – he hadn't been a barista in years, and he'd never done it full-time before – but within a few days he had the whole system down pat (whatever miserable semblance of a system James had created before Carey came along, that is) and customers looked at him with relief when they realized he was making the coffee instead of James.

Carey fit in so seamlessly at Herb's Electronics that it was almost like he'd always been there. Like he'd always been rolling in just before five in the morning, brewing the first pot of coffee just so he could drop a mug off with Paul in the kitchen, knowing he'd already be there, up to his elbows in flour. Paul would smile in surprise and then thanks, nodding to Carey, and then James would come creeping down the stairs from the apartments, his hair the only part of him that looked awake.

James would nod at Carey too, probably try to steal something off the work counter (some days Paul would let him get away with it, but he'd smack James's hand with a spoon anyway out of principle). James would help Carey set up the front, bringing all of the morning's fresh pastries out, and then he'd scamper off to hide in his office as soon as customers started showing up; he was very obnoxious and gleeful about having Carey dealing with customers so he didn't have to.

"You're such a dick for letting me spend  _years_  up there by myself, Paulie," he'd whine, and Paul would ignore him, as was his wont.

Carey didn't really mind the customers. The whole job was pleasantly mind-numbing. Even at its busiest, filling orders was just a series of steps to follow, procedural, easy. The same motions done in the correct order to achieve the desired outcome. It was sort of like his degree, if his degree had involved coffee and muffins.

He would cover the front, with James popping up on occasion to help him out or cover his breaks. Somewhere around nine Ben would come in, and he and Carey would high-five without breaking a stride as Ben headed to the kitchen to help Paul with prep work and orders. Closer to two, just as Carey was rounding out his shift, Kuzya would appear, often running late after coming directly from class, and Carey would let him chatter in his ear in any mix of languages about his friends and his lectures and whatever the Caps had done the night before until it was time for Carey to leave.

Then Carey would hang his apron up, make his goodbyes, bless his early shift that let him get good street parking right in front of the bakery, and go home. There he would stay, reading a book or watching tv or staring at the walls of his tiny apartment, debating if he wanted to stay here long enough to invest in real estate, until nine o'clock came around and he readied himself for bed so he could get up and do the whole thing over again in the morning.

It was boring. It was monotonous. There was no spark, no excitement, no hotel linens and flights every two days and crowded buses and screaming fans and the feeling of your heart pounding with the potential of what might happen next – but it was warm. The bakery had a softness to it, like time there was tinged in fading sunlight and foxed around the edges, a comfortable familiarity to its repetition. Carey knew what to expect every day. He knew what his coworkers were like, how they behaved. He knew he could trust them, or at least he could trust them with this version of himself. (He could probably trust him with the rest of himself too, but that would defeat the purpose of coming to Nashville in the first place.)

Carey had a love-hate relationship with the show  _Cheers_ , because while he came to Nashville for the sheer purpose of going somewhere he knew nobody would ever look for him, a place where nobody would ever know his name, and he took a barista job because it was so anonymous and forgettable and nothing like his old life – there was still something to be said for having a place where everybody knew your name.

Even if that place was a weird little independent coffee shop and bakery in Nashville, staffed by the only four people in the entire city who had even the slightest inkling that you existed.

Carey had known anonymity would be lonely, but that didn't make it any less miserable.

He found that he liked his forgettable, boring day job. He'd always liked being able to do something he was good at, and he was a very good barista. He liked his coworkers, enjoyed working with them, chirping James or having morning coffee with Paul or sharing smirks with Ben or teasing Kuzya. Work might not have been fun, but it was the most entertaining part of Carey's day.

His life in Nashville was routine. It was quiet. He took no chances, he made no waves, he never did anything more upsetting than mocking James's coffee-making skills, and so nobody had any reason to take note of him.

Carey's life in Nashville was safe. It wasn't necessarily what he wanted, but it was what he needed, maybe by being a change from his past, or maybe by being the absence of everything that his past contained.

His present was absent an important person from his past as well, but then, that's why Carey was in Nashville in the first place.

If he wanted to forget about his past, he had to get used to how things were now. And the way things were now wasn't so bad.

At least, until his boss started dating a hockey player.

~~~

Carey knew there was hockey in Nashville. Shit, Carey had been to Nashville before  _because_  of hockey. It wasn't like the concept of NHL players in Tennessee was new to him.

But knowing that NHL players existed within a ten mile radius of his quiet new life didn't mean he was expecting for the man his boss had been pining over for months to turn out to be Rich Clune.

He didn't think he'd ever seen Clune before, not in person. Given Clune's record in the NHL, it was entirely possible that they never would have crossed paths. He had no reason to fear that Clune might recognize him. In fact, there was no real reason for anybody on the Nashville Predators to recognize him; he'd never met them before, and there was no reason for them to associate him with the Canadiens.

That didn't stop the initial frisson of fear, that short jolt of anxiety when Kuzya told him that the owner of the "DICKY" mug that James had been miserable over for months was actually Rich Clune. There was a difference between knowing that the bakery was filling a huge custom order for a Nashville Predators event and having the expectation that players might actually start to spend their time around the bakery.

He told himself it was nothing – even if they saw his face and knew his name and learned that he used to live in Montreal, there was no reason for them to have a clue who he used to be or question how he'd come to be a barista in Nashville, and honestly even if they knew who he was there was no reason for them to give a flying fuck about him.

Unless someone was looking for him. Unless word had somehow gotten out through friends-of-friends of Canadiens players that he'd disappeared without a word, resigned and skipped town without a trace, that he wouldn't even tell his parents anything other than that he was safe, and they'd asked people to keep an eye out for him. Then maybe they would tell someone back in Montreal, who might come looking for him, and they would want answers about why he'd left, and if management found out they would-

Fuck, he never used to be this paranoid. Rich Clune didn't know who Carey was. None of his teammates knew who he was. None of the  _staff_  members knew who he was.

To them, Carey would just be that enigmatic barista from Canada who might have lived in Montreal at some point.

Besides, nobody in Nashville gave a fuck about a former assistant athletic trainer to the Montreal Canadiens. Nobody in the league gave a fuck about that.

Part of Carey desperately wished that at least one person gave a fuck, but that was the part of Carey that he was supposed to smother in Montreal. He was a different person now. He had a new life, as isolated as it was.

He was safe.

 _Safe_  had never sounded so threatening before.

~~~

Nobody ever did recognize Carey. Even when Rich started hanging out around the shop, harassing James to make him some sort of unpalatable caffeinated monstrosity and exchanging sappy looks over the counter, he never saw Carey as anything other than the barista and, later on, James's friend. Sometimes he brought in one of his teammates, or they would come in on their own, but they never blinked twice at Carey. Actually, at this point most of them were under the impression that his name really was "SCarey," because that's what some genius had seen fit to write on his nametag and he'd never bothered to get it fixed.

Nobody questioned it. Everyone took his story at face value.

The small, vain, irrational part of himself was disappointed. It was dumb; he knew his resignation wasn't enough to make any sort of news, even in Montreal.

Carey had been just as anonymous in Montreal as he was now. It was just that before, he stood next to greatness, and when the light reflected off him just right, he started to look like he mattered.

At least he'd mattered to one person. He'd mattered too much – that was what had gotten him into this whole mess.

When he saw an NHL player walk through the doors to Herb's Electronics, he smiled and kept his mouth shut.

Life went on.

He tried to call his family at least every two weeks, just to let them know he was alive. They still didn't understand. His mother still cried, his father still yelled, his sister still cursed him out, sounding like her heart was breaking. They'd come to expect it now, for him to insist that he didn't want to say where he was yet, that he was safe and everything was going well, but it was best he keep to himself for now. They expected it, but they didn't like it.

"If you're worried that, that someone will come after you," his mother had said, choking back tears when he told her he wouldn't make it home for Christmas, "We won't tell anyone where you are. Not even – not even your friend, if he calls again. Even if you don't come home, you could just tell us where you are, and maybe we could come see you-"

He wanted to say yes. The words were on the tip of his tongue, ready to take a leap to freedom with every hitch of his mother's breath. He was breaking her heart; he was breaking all of their hearts, he knew that. He told them what little he could – that he was safe, that he had an apartment, and a job, and friends he liked. He never lied to them, and so he never said he was happy – it wasn't quite a lie, but it wasn't quite the truth, either, and so it was best kept to himself.

He wanted to say he would come home, to visit or to stay, or that they could come see him, but-

But.

There was always that chance, that small chance that they might tell someone where he was, or might just mention in passing that he'd come to visit, and then word could get back to Montreal that he'd been seen, and then people might come find him and figure out what happened, and then it would all be his fault when-

Christ, Carey needed some fucking counseling.

He never used to be like this. For the most part he wasn't – nobody in Carey's new life would have a clue that he had these ridiculous, irrational fears (irrational, except in the miniscule chance that they became horrendously, incredibly true). They wouldn't know that he spent half his life running through strange scenarios that might lead to someone finding out exactly why he had left Montreal – and if they found out why he left, then he could technically be breaking that stupid fucking agreement he'd signed, and if they did that-

Well. He'd had a choice to make, hadn't he. Leave, and never show your face in Quebec again, or stay, and be the reason that PK Subban never plays in the NHL ever again.

Okay. So maybe it wasn't a choice.

Carey never would have chosen anything over PK, after all. PK's wellbeing, his happiness, his career – that was what mattered.

Everything else was secondary, including Carey.  _Especially_  Carey.

And their relationship.

~~~

It happened like this:

Carey's life fell apart on a Thursday.

The Habs had just finished playing their second game of the preseason against the Avalanche, an overtime win. Carey was going through his usual routine, checking in with the boys, making sure everyone did their post-game cool-down workout, looking players over for new injuries that they didn't want to report because nobody wanted to be sidelined before the season even started.

It was the same routine Carey had followed for the past two years working with the Canadiens, and even before that when he'd worked with the Bulldogs.

The only difference was when he was pulled aside as the rest of the staff were hauling their supplies and equipment to the team bus, readying for their flight to Colorado for the rematch Friday night.

He was surprised to be led to a windowless conference room filled with grim-faced men in suits, a few he recognized from the front office, and more he didn't.

He was even more surprised to be slid a manila folder containing pictures of him and PK smiling, laughing – kissing. The evidence was damning.

He'd been too dumb to be nervous. There were no rules against staff members having romantic relationships with players. He knew that was only because the organization had never imagined that any of their precious players could possibly be gay, had never thought it was something that they had to warn against.

Carey had been so, so naive back then. He'd thought he knew what they were going to say. They would tell him that they were disappointed, that this could be a media disaster, that he and PK had to agree to never see each other again and they would have to bury all of the evidence of their relationship and never associate with each other again. There were no gay players in the NHL, they would say, and they couldn't afford to be the first.

They said some of those things. Carey had expected it, had planned for it from the first time PK's smile had made something swoop low and warm in his stomach. He still felt like he had a plan, like he was in control. He had his rebuttals in place, his platitudes, his veiled threats. His talk of lawyering up if they tried to fire him for being gay, and wouldn't that look even worse to the public? He'd had it all right there, just waiting for them to give him the opportunity.

Until they went off-script.

They weren't firing him, they'd said. He was going to resign.

He'd actually laughed, because he'd still thought he knew how this was going to go.

They'd told him to sign a nondisclosure agreement. They'd wanted him to agree that he'd never tell anyone what had gone on between him and PK - not his family, not the press, not even his priest. And after he signed, he was to leave Montreal, lest he become a "distraction" to the team.

He'd refused. They threatened to blacklist him. He didn't care - he'd never work in the NHL again just by nature of resigning under peculiar circumstances from the Canadiens. Nobody was so desperate for assistant athletic trainers that they'd want somebody that Montreal would throw away, even if they made it look like it was his choice to up and leave a week into the preseason. And if the Habs wanted him out of Montreal that badly, they would make sure that not even the most miserable of gyms would have him.

It didn't matter. It wasn't about him. He'd loved his job - he'd worked towards it for years, ever since his hip made going professional an impossible dream back in high school. He'd done what he wanted - he'd made it to the NHL, whatever way he could, and he'd found himself something even better. He'd give that up if he had to, for PK. He would do just about anything for PK. It didn't matter if he worked at the checkout in a grocery store, if he could have PK.

He told them they were welcome to do whatever they liked. He was still smirking when he said it.

They said they would get a little too sick of PK's showboating, that his lack of "team spirit" wasn't enough to make up for his "underperformance" on the ice, and they'd bury him. They would bench him, and the management would make disappointed comments disparaging him, and they would send him down, and they would break his spirit and grind him down until nobody remembered the name PK Subban.

"He'll never play in the NHL again," they'd said. "Are you sure you want that on your conscience?"

Carey signed the papers.

That night, he started packing his things.

The next day, he called his parents and told them he'd resigned from the Canadiens, that maybe he wouldn't come back to B.C. for a bit, not until he figured out what he was doing next.

Two days later, he packed everything he cared about in his car and headed for the border.

Three days later, he texted PK from a dingy hotel somewhere in rural Ohio to tell him that they just weren't working out.

Four days later, he blocked every contact on his phone that he wasn't related to by blood to stop all of the texts and phone calls from Montreal area codes.

Five days later, the U.S. interstate highway system landed him in Nashville, and he figured that was as good a place as any to hang out for a while.

Six days later, while on a walk from his motel to forage for food, he saw a sign advertising available barista positions at a bakery disguising itself as an electronic store and thought that he couldn't get any further from being an athletic trainer for the Montreal Canadiens if he tried.

Seven days later, he tied an apron around his waist and for the first time in a week, he felt free.

~~~

Carey had been in Nashville for over a year and a half, now. Their little shop had been through a lot: becoming the go-to bakery for corporate events, getting so much business in the mornings that there was actually a  _line_ , and of course, the drama of the boss's hockey player boyfriend being sent down to the AHL.

He hadn't minded the first two, but they all could have lived without the third one. James had been a wreck when Clune was put on waivers with the intent of reassigning him to Milwaukee – well, a James-sort of wreck, which meant more than his usual level of functionally dysfunctional.

Clune cleared waivers and was sent down to Milwaukee, but that didn't stop James from fretting about the state of their relationship. He wouldn't tell his boyfriend about his concerns, of course, instead making everyone else at the shop listen to him mope and whine and draw frowns on cookies until Paul had finally called Rich himself with strict instructions to "talk to your fucking boyfriend."

Carey didn't know what they'd talked about, but whatever Rich had said must have been enough to soothe James's many and varied anxieties, because he'd been much calmer about the whole thing ever since. And he'd certainly perked right back up when Rich got called up with the rest of the Black Aces after Milwaukee's season ended.

There had been talk that the last season of his contract might be bought out, and they'd had to start over again with James's frantic pacing and lamenting to anybody who stood near him for too long (Carey got very good at slipping away quietly before he could get cornered).

But the Preds agreed to give Rich a chance to prove himself, and he stuck around another year – this time, in Nashville.

So hockey players kept coming into the shop, but by that time Carey was mostly able to ignore it. By now he'd met at least half of the Nashville Predators, and none of them had a clue who he was other than that he was the Canadian barista (hearing that he was from British Columbia was usually enough to get some of them waxing poetic about their hometowns).

In fact, his coworkers still hadn't figured it out either, though true to form, they didn't try that hard anyway. The closest to the truth, outside of Kuzya's scarily accurate conspiracy theories, had been Ben. He'd been removing mugs from the dishwasher and started to fumble one; when Carey lunged forward and caught it, Ben had smiled in that way that made his eyes crinkle and said, "Goalie, right?"

Carey's eyes had gone wide. It wasn't a particularly dangerous piece of information to share – he hadn't been a goalie since high school after all, outside of a rec league – but it was more than he'd admitted about his past in the entire time he'd been in Nashville. With how bad his paranoia had become, even admitting he once went to Disneyland as a child had felt like some sort of huge disclosure.

But Ben had just continued smiling and shook his head.

"A goalie always recognizes another goalie," he'd said. He'd winked and taken the mug from Carey's hands, continuing on his way like nothing had even happened, leaving Carey to realize that when it came right down to it, none of them knew a single thing about Ben's past either.

Ben's happy smiles and cheerful demeanor just did a much better job of hiding it.

Fuck, maybe Carey should be smiling more.

By the time that hockey season came to a close and it was time for James to start wringing his hands about his boyfriend's future in Nashville again, Carey was feeling pretty settled where he was. He'd been in Nashville for nearly two years. If you'd told him back in college that one day he'd be content as a barista, he would have laughed you right out the door and to the nearest hospital to get your head checked out, but it was true.

He was comfortable.

He had coworkers who had quickly become his friends, and they'd actually started hanging out together outside of work. Carey had piled into Paul's apartment with everyone else to watch Nashville in the playoffs, and for once he almost hadn't felt sick to his stomach thinking about how much he missed the thrill of being behind the bench for playoff hockey. He must have shown a little unease, because Ben had nudged his arm, smirking when he caught Carey's eye.

"Once a goalie," he'd muttered quietly, and Carey had let himself smile back, because there was no way he was admitting the real reason that watching hockey made him antsy. Sometimes he missed James's moratorium on all things hockey. Things had been easier, then.

He'd started looking into buying a house. He was paid much better than any barista probably had a right to be, but he wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth. There was enough squirreled away in his bank account that he could actually probably afford to put a down payment on something small. There would be more of a commute, but he'd missed having land of his own, the way that his family had back home.

Carey was actually considering making a visit back home. He'd never gone this long without seeing his parents. He'd Skyped them, let them see that he was physically okay and not just making calls once a week while tied to a chair by his kidnappers, as his sister had suggested, but seeing someone through a camera wasn't the same as experiencing them in person.

It had been almost two years, since everything changed. Nobody would be looking for him anymore. There couldn't be any danger in going back to Canada, at least not to his tiny little town that nobody had ever heard of on the opposite end of the country from Quebec.

He wasn't getting his old life back. He'd never be able to do that, not really. At this point, he wasn't even sure he would want to go back to being an athletic trainer. It was something he was passionate about, but part of that passion had been because it was a way to stay connected to the game, to see the NHL.

Carey had seen the NHL. He'd seen an Original Six team, up close and in vivid technicolor. He'd gotten close enough to be burned.

He would always love hockey, but he was pretty sure he'd had his fill of the NHL.

No, he wasn't going to be getting his old life back, but he thought he was building a pretty good one here. All of this, looking into getting his own house, considering a visit home – that was taking his new life and blessing it with some normalcy, letting him take the best parts of his past and bring them back into the present again.

Well, not the very best part of his past. That made a stunning reappearance at the end of June, when it was announced that Shea Weber had been traded to the Montreal Canadiens in exchange for one PK Subban.

The very best part of Carey's past was coming to Nashville, and Carey was so, so fucked.

~~~

It started like this:

Carey first met PK on a Tuesday.

He'd been hired in over the summer of 2012, pulled from the Hamilton Bulldogs after an opening became available with Montreal's training staff. Nobody had noticed Carey's hiring, not with all of the organizational turnover – a new general manager, a new coaching staff. Everyone in the front office had that shiny, new executive smell, and a new assistant athletic trainer was but a footnote in the spate of hirings.

Within the context of the lockout and the never-ending offseason, absolutely nobody remembered that Carey worked for the Habs now, including Carey, seeing as he spent the fall of 2012 continuing in his old position with the Bulldogs. Working in the NHL lost a lot of its luster when he was still on loan in the minors.

In a vague way he thought that it was kind of like having the real NHL player experience. At least it felt like it was when he was listening to Brendan Gallagher gripe about how he was missing out on his first year in the NHL because of the lockout.

Hockey came back with the new year, and suddenly with the lockout over, everyone was rushing to get ready for an abbreviated season. And that meant that very quickly, Carey was spending his days with the rest of the training staff, hurrying to prepare for the season that almost wasn't.

Training camp started on a Tuesday. The first day consisted of orientations and introductions. Nobody thought to introduce Carey to the team, but he wasn't surprised to be overlooked when the players were meeting all new coaches and management.

The second part of the day consisted of athletic testing. That was where Carey first met most of the players, introducing himself while strapping a mask to their face and running them ragged on a treadmill. The few who recognized him from Hamilton were excited to see him, clapping him on the back with familiar smiles. It was nice that he could make them happy before he made them miserable.

He already knew who PK Subban was. To be fair, Carey knew who all of the Canadiens were – it was part of his job to know them all, including the guys who were newer to the organization than Carey. But it was hard to follow the Canadiens, to follow  _hockey_ , and not know of PK Subban.

He had a way of making himself unforgettable.

Carey could never forget the moment that they first met. He was disinfecting the mask for the VO2 max test when a warm hand clapped down on his shoulder. He looked up, directly into a blindingly bright smile, complete with little crinkles around his eyes, and distinctly remembered thinking,  _"Oh, shit."_

Because it only took one smile for Carey to start falling for PK Subban. He'd continued falling ever since.

"Hey, you're Carey, right?" PK had said. Carey was so distracted by the firm press of PK's hand to his shoulder that he almost didn't recognize that this meant PK had been asking around about him.

"Uh, yeah." God, but he was never at a loss for words around anyone but PK. "Carey Price."

He'd held out a hand to shake, but it was made moot by PK tugging him in for a hug. It was quick, and grossly sweaty, and Carey thought there was no way PK couldn't feel how his heart pounded when he pressed a hand between Carey's shoulders.

"The Price is Right," PK said with a smile, pulling away and clapping Carey on the shoulder again. "We're gonna do great things this year, baby."

Later on, much later, PK would insist that by "great things" he'd also meant "a torrid secret romance where he swept Carey off his feet with such finesse that Carey didn't even realize they were dating until PK kissed him when Carey went to say goodbye for the summer."

Carey always told him that he was full of it, rolled his eyes and smiled while PK protested and defended his honor, but he'd always admitted that there was a certain poetry to it. Right from the start, it felt like they'd been meant to find each other, to be together. PK liked to tease that they were his favorite romance novel.

Now, looking back, Carey could say that he'd perhaps been a little too accurate. What they'd always forgotten was that in any romance novel, the protagonists were never happy forever. Something had to go wrong, had to tear them apart, make them fight their way back to each other.

Carey had discovered their missing plot device, alright. But in this case there was no daring rescue, no fight to the death to save their relationship. There was only Carey, skipping town under duress from his employers who'd threatened to ruin his boyfriend's life if Carey didn't comply with their demands.

Sometimes, Carey felt like the villain in his own story. He must have been to PK, after he ended a year and a half long relationship via text message and cut off all communication and broken his heart. Carey would hate himself, if he were PK.

But back when it had all started, before the subterfuge of keeping things quiet from a team who might not accept them and management who certainly wouldn't, before the criticisms about PK "showboating" and Carey's parents nervously commenting on how he talked about his "friend" a little too much, before Carey had tried to say goodbye for the summer and PK kissed him like the world was ending, it had just been Carey and PK, smiling at each other like idiots over an athletic fitness test while Brandon Prust chirped them for taking too long.

Carey first met PK on a Tuesday, and his whole world was turned upside down.

He never wanted to fix it.

~~~

Despite his recently discovered paranoia, Carey was not actually one for freaking out. Everyone had always teased him for his ability to stay cool under pressure, whether it was calmly stitching up somebody's disgusting facial laceration in the middle of a hockey game or correctly assembling an order for an angry soccer mom buying ten different drinks that all required strange, extremely specific alterations.

Carey didn't get upset easily, because he didn't let things bother him that much.

But he reserved the right to have a bit of a meltdown when his coworkers all started chattering about what it would mean for the Predators to have PK Subban on the team. He didn't think he could be blamed for freaking out when his boyfriend was coming to town.

Well. Not his boyfriend anymore. He probably had stopped being PK's boyfriend around the time that he fled Montreal while PK was away and broke up with him via a one-line text message. But the  _ex_  part just made the whole thing feel even worse.

Carey had never expected to see PK again. He'd resigned himself to it, even, steeled himself for a future where he would watch PK from afar, his triumphs and successes, and console himself with the cold comfort that he'd helped make this all possible by leaving. Fuck, he'd even prepared himself for a future where PK got married and had a gaggle of ridiculously adorable, bright-eyed children (whether he married a woman or a man, Carey was sure that PK would want to have enough children to ice a starting lineup, and they would all be the cutest little shits he'd ever seen).

He hadn't considered the possibility of PK coming to Nashville. Not when he'd come to mean so much to the city of Montreal – and not when there were literally twenty-eight other teams he could play on. And even when Carey had first come to Nashville, he never would have imagined that PK being in Nashville would have meant that there was any realistic probability of their paths crossing in a city of close to seven hundred thousand people.

But Carey's boss was dating an NHL player who'd just received the contract extension he'd been fighting for all year, and that meant that they could expect for Nashville Predators players to continue frequenting their shop. And  _that_  meant that some time in the increasingly near future there was a non-zero possibility that Carey's ex-boyfriend, who he had signed a legally binding contract to never associate with ever again, would come waltzing into Carey's place of work, bringing them face-to-face for the first time in almost two years.

Would the NDA with the Canadiens even matter anymore, now that PK was playing for Nashville? Probably not, but then, Tennessee wasn't the most accepting of places, even if Nashville itself was somewhat better. Maybe the Predators would feel the same as the Habs had – or worse.

No, wait, that didn't make sense. They all knew about Rich and James, they knew that Rich liked guys, or at least the team knew, and so the management probably knew as well. They probably didn't mind then, right?

But for all of his social media antics, Rich was actually pretty private about his relationships. Carey knew for a fact that there was no reference to James on his social media, because Kuzya liked to give James shit for it. Maybe the Predators knew he was in a gay relationship, and they told him to put a gag order on it. Maybe his relationship with James was why he'd struggled to stay in the NHL, because he refused to stop dating a guy. Maybe it was only accepted because the public didn't know, because it wasn't drawing "negative press" to the team and taking attention off of the sport, and PK had already had accusations of that, he didn't need more, especially starting with a new team.

And fuck, none of that had any bearing on how  _PK_  would feel, seeing Carey after Carey had just run off like that, without ever giving him a real reason or a goodbye. Would he be angry? Of course he would be angry, unless he – fuck, maybe he didn't even care anymore, maybe he'd already moved on and was in love with someone else, and Carey should be happy for him because he wanted PK to be happy, but that might be even worse, if PK didn't even care about seeing him, and-

"Carey, hey- whoa!"

The splash of hot water against his hand snapped him out of his anxious stupor. And then Ben was in front of him, taking the pot of scalding water from Carey's hand and leading him with a firm hand on his wrist to the sink. He shoved Carey's hand under the stream of cool water while he apologized to the customer and told him that they would have his drink ready in a moment.

His hand pressed against Carey's waist just briefly as he ducked into the kitchen. Ben came back a moment later with James in tow, who was already grumbling about how even Carey's half-made coffee was better than whatever he could come up with. But his eyes narrowed when he caught sight of Carey's hand, still red under the water.

"Don't put the water too cold," he said, as he started squinting at one of the cheat sheets he still kept under the counter on how to make everything. "Freezing cold water on a burn can be just as bad as hot water."

Carey was going to ask how James knew that – James rarely presented himself as an authority on much of anything, even his own business – when he remembered that half of the reason he had been hired in the first place was that James was horrendously clumsy when it came to making coffee and had a long track record of scalding and burning himself on steam and boiling water. Given the number of small, shiny scars on his hands and arms he was probably well-versed enough in burn care to open his own clinic.

Carey manfully resisted the urge to turn the cold water on full blast.

James must have figured out the coffee order well enough, or maybe he just didn't care enough to wait for the customer to pass judgment on it, because as soon as he handed over the drink he was already reaching under the counter to pull out the first aid kit.

"Okay, let me see."

Feeling a little out of his element to not only have his boss frowning at him but Ben peering over in concern, Carey held his hand out.

James squinted at it with way more attention than Carey thought it really deserved.

"It probably won't need gauze, and it doesn't look like it'll get super gross, but it's going to hurt."

"Oh, boy."

"Hey!" James pointed at him scoldingly, still digging through the kit with his other hand. "I said it wasn't going to be gross, so you should be a little more grateful. I've had some beauties where your skin starts bubbling and it cracks up and then the oozing starts – until you get one of those, you don't get to snark at me about burns, got it? Now dab it dry with – Ben, can you grab some paper towels?"

A wad of paper towels appeared in front of Carey's face almost instantly; he hadn't even heard Ben move. Still uneasy, Carey carefully patted his hand dry, hissing when he pressed on too-red skin.

"That's why you have to be  _gentle_ ," James tsked. "Hand, please."

Eerily reminded of having his mom clean his scrapes as a child, Carey held out his hand, letting James slather some sort of ointment on it with light, careful fingers.

"It probably doesn't need a bandage," James said, "But if it starts blistering or if you keep bumping it against things we might have to cover it."

Carey examined his hand with a critical eye.

"You know, I probably could have done this myself."

He didn't point out that he'd cleaned up much worse in the middle of a game before slapping a guy on the back and sending them back out on the ice.

James rolled his eyes, not bothering to look up as he started putting things back into the kit. "Shut up, Carey. Humor me, it makes me feel competent to look after you for a change."

He didn't wait for Carey to come up with a response before ducking back into the kitchen, which was good, because he honestly didn't know what he was supposed to say to that. He wasn't used to feeling that way around James, so off-kilter and wrong-footed.

Carey couldn't remember the last time that someone had tried to take care of him, but he was sure it hadn't been since Montreal.

He had almost forgotten how nice it felt.

Ben sidled up next to him, leaning against the counter and crossing his arms over his chest. Even slouched as he was, he still towered over Carey. It was a novel experience, standing next to someone who was actually taller than him. In almost two years of knowing Ben, it never stopped being a surprise.

"So what happened there?" Ben nudged his shoulder against Carey's.

"Nothing, I just got distracted for a moment."

Ben snorted and leveled him an unimpressed look.

"You don't  _get_  distracted."

That was actually fairly true, not that Carey was going to acknowledge it.

"Everyone has bad days."

Ben was nearly seven feet tall, and therefore had no right to look so much like a kicked puppy. "You're having a bad day?"

Carey pulled a face and bumped their shoulders together again.

"Not that bad, just...things on my mind."

"Things that make you spill hot water on yourself?"

" _Things_ ," Carey repeated. He raised an eyebrow, and Ben took it with grace. He flashed a bashful little smile and ducked his head, acceding to Carey's right to keep things to himself.

That was why Carey got along so well with Ben – he teased, and sometimes he asked questions, but when Carey set a clear boundary, he never pushed for more.

Nobody could say the same for Kuzya, but Carey suspected that Kuzya had never met a boundary that he didn't interpret as a challenge. It was part of his alleged charm.

"I actually came out here to ask if you wanted to go grab lunch," Ben said. They did that sometimes, just to get out of the bakery for a while. Well, technically it was Ben's lunch break and the end of Carey's shift, but that was fine. He liked the company, and he was perennially starving by the end of his shift anyway.

He smiled. "Sure, just as soon as Kuzy gets here."

"He's still not in?"

Carey raised an eyebrow. "Have you heard him come in?"

As if summoned by some unholy force, the man himself came sweeping through the front doors in a flurry of motion, shouting, "Not late if boss does not know!"

"Boss knows!" James called from the back.

Kuzya cursed thoroughly in Russian as he came around the display case. Carey and Ben pressed themselves against the counter to avoid the carnage as he stomped to the back.

Ben nudged Carey's shoulder again. "Doesn't he make you miss college?"

"Not that part of it," Carey muttered. Then he paused. "You went to college?"

It wasn't that Ben didn't come off as an intelligent guy, but he'd never mentioned it before. Carey having gone to college was one of the few things he let his coworkers know about his past, even if he refused to say where he went or what his degree was in.

Still, he kept enough secrets that it shouldn't have bothered him nearly so much that Ben had a few of his own.

Ben just smiled and shrugged one shoulder, the one still brushed up against Carey's. "What can I say, we're the most educated bakery and coffee shop in Nashville."

"That's sad, seeing as we're all so fucking stupid."

That surprised a laugh out of Ben. He smiled down at Carey, looking like he was about to say something, when Kuzya shoved his way through the door again, already waving his phone around and asking, "You see new Subban interview?"

And that was Carey's cue to leave. He'd made an art of avoiding most hockey media for the past few years, which was quite the skill seeing as NHL players regularly frequented his place of work. He wasn't like James and Paul, he didn't have an aversion to the sport overall and have to gently ease himself back into it. He could watch the playoffs or listen to Kuzya ramble on about how Ovechkin was somehow underappreciated (complete with video evidence) without batting an eye.

He just found that avoiding hockey media when possible greatly decreased his chances of having to see any reference to the Canadiens, and even more so, to PK.

One time last year NBC had thrown up a still photo of PK, and that was enough to have Carey's heart in knots for days, running that image over and over in his mind, hungrily cataloguing every tiny way that PK's face had changed in the past two years. It made him want to do something incredibly stupid, like watch videos of him and go to see the Habs when they visited Nashville, or drive his idiot self up to Montreal and knock on PK's door and beg him to understand that he'd left to protect him.

If one photo that he'd seen for twenty seconds was enough to make him feel that way, he knew he was better off avoiding anything related to PK. He hadn't heard his voice since that last day in the preseason, before everything had gone to shit.

It had been right after the game, and he'd grabbed Carey up in a hug from behind as soon as he came into the dressing room, sweaty and huge in his gear.

"Two for two in wins, baby!" he'd cheered far too close to Carey's ear. "It's gonna be a great year!"

There had been a variety of cheers around them, and Carey had made a show of shoving PK off of him, letting everyone see PK was just teasing, it was just a joke, even if nobody was paying attention.

PK had smirked at him, the way he did when he really wanted to wink but knew that Carey would give him a speech about discretion for it later, and he'd gone to his stall to strip out of his gear.

Carey had been pulled away to check out someone's tweaked ankle, and that was the last time he'd seen PK in person.

He hadn't heard his voice in almost two years, and he didn't think he could handle it right now, surrounded by his coworkers watching a video on Kuzya's phone. It was probably for the best that he avoided feeling like he was being stabbed in the heart while in the workplace.

He slipped through the door to the kitchen just as Kuzya got the video cued up, but he couldn't help looking back over his shoulder, some masochistic part of him wanting so badly to catch any snatch of PK that he could.

What he got instead was Ben smirking at him, even as he obligingly leaned over Kuzya's shoulder to see his phone. Ben's smile grew as he caught Carey's eye, and he jerked his head in the direction of the kitchen, giving Carey permission to flee.

Carey let the door shut between them. He took a deep breath, hands curling in the front of his apron, schooling himself. When he turned around, Paul wasn't looking at him, but Carey had been around long enough to know that just because Paul wasn't looking didn't mean he didn't know exactly what was happening.

Thankfully, he didn't say anything as Carey took his apron off, hanging it on the wall.

James came out of his office then, frowning in the direction of the door.

"Do you think I should get a time clock or something?" As per usual, he was addressing the room in general, because there was a fifty-fifty chance that Paul would just ignore James as it suited him.

Okay, this was something Carey could deal with.

"Can you not keep track of three employees?" he asked, putting on his most guileless expression.

James narrowed his eyes. "It's going to be two if you don't watch it."

Just like that, everything felt a little more right in the world. A little less frantic.

And then Rich Clune just had to go and make all of Carey's worst nightmares come true.

~~~

For reasons that Carey could never quite understand, Rich decided that his new contract was a good reason to play welcome wagon to new players in Nashville. This didn't make sense because Rich was, under his own admission, a giant asshole.

To be fair, he'd made that perfectly clear when he reached out to PK [on twitter](https://swedishgoaliemafia.tumblr.com/post/146733561454/filipf0rsberg-this-is-the-greatest-thing-ive), which Carey was only aware of because Kuzya followed him and thought it was hilarious. Apparently PK was also one of those people like James who found Rich to be endearing instead of irritating (though James did also tell him that he was irritating, regularly and loudly, so Carey was a little proud of him).

Carey found this out because a few weeks after the trade, Rich brought PK fucking Subban into Herb's Electronics.

It was one thing to know that PK was going to be in town – that was all Kuzya would talk about, until Carey had asked if he was perhaps switching allegiances to Nashville, after which he'd been so offended that he'd refused to speak anything but Russian until the end of Carey's shift (and quite possibly after Carey was gone, knowing him). But knowing that he was going to be doing some goodwill press around the city wasn't the same as expecting him to  _actually_  walk into Carey's place of work like in all of his nightmares – though to be honest, he had probably about as many good dreams of the same scenario.

He'd known it was a possibility. His paranoia wouldn't let him  _forget_  that it was a possibility, because he knew that Rich had reached out to PK, and that PK was touring around town, and that Rich had a habit of bringing his teammates to his boyfriend's business. He'd prepared himself for this situation for the past two years, imagining what he would do under the distant circumstances that PK, or anyone else from Carey's past, came into Herb's Electronics.

And now that he knew that those distant circumstances were all too real, he'd spent the past few days constantly on edge, eyes narrowed at the front windows, flinching every time the bell over the door rang.

Carey was incredibly fucking prepared when he spotted Rich pass by the window with someone else in tow. And he only needed the slightest glance to have a very good idea of who that person might be.

If he could recognize PK's silhouette climbing into his bed in the middle of the night, he could certainly recognize it through a window on a brightly lit July summer day.

So Carey did what he'd always told himself he would do, and he threw himself through the fucking door to the kitchen like he was diving from a bomb.

He caught himself before he stumbled and jerked to his left, over towards the ovens, probably the most uncomfortable place to stand in the entire building right about now. It also happened to be out of view of the door to the front, in case anyone just so happened to open it.

"Someone needs to cover the front," he said, feeling suspiciously like he needed to gasp for air. It was probably the fucking ovens, running all day long and making the whole room feel like it was baking.

"Carey? Are you okay?"

Ben was frowning, putting down a rolling pin and coming towards Carey with his hands out like he was placating a spooked horse. His eyes were bright with concern, but all Carey could see was the smudge of flour on his cheek.

"The front," he said. "I can't...Rich is here, someone should grab James."

James would come out front for his boyfriend – they all knew that Rich didn't come in to see any of the rest of them. They would just send him out, and then Rich would hang out for a bit before leaving, taking any and all guests with him, and then Carey's life could go back to normal.

But if James didn't get out there quickly, Rich might get ballsy, and he'd come back here looking for them, and he'd bring his guests with him, and-

"Carey, come sit down," Paul said, actually looking up at him, and fuck, he must look like shit for Paul to look that alarmed. "Don't stand near the ovens, you look like you're going to pass out."

"I'm not going to pass out," he said. He was shooting for dismissive, but his tone landed somewhere around feeble, like he was trying to coax himself into believing it.

 _Fuck_ , this wasn't him. He never used to get like this. There was no reason for him to feel like this, like his heart was beating so fast it was about to crawl out of his throat, like his chest was too tight to remember how to breath correctly.

God, these ovens were making him sweat.

He startled at a hand on his elbow, which only made Ben frown even more as he urged Carey to a stool at the far end of the work counter, on the opposite side of the room from the ovens, right near the walk-in freezer.

Stools had never felt quite so challenging before, but maybe a chair would have been better, because when Carey sat down he had to lean forward to brace his elbows on the counter, suddenly overwhelmed by vertigo.

Why was he acting like this? He'd known this could happen, he'd prepared himself for this happening, he'd done exactly what he'd always planned and he was fine, nobody knew anything, he was safe and he was keeping PK safe, why did he feel like he couldn't breathe, why-

A hand landed on the back of Carey's neck, big enough to span the entire length of it and gritty with flour. Ben, it had to be. He rubbed Carey's neck soothingly, just enough to distract him for a moment. "Hold tight, I'll be right back."

Carey could hear him walking away, but didn't feel well enough to lift his head from the table.

He could hear Paul approaching before he heard him speak.

"Try to take deep, even breaths. Come on, breathe with me, in through your nose. Panting through your mouth makes it worse. You want to exhale more than you inhale."

Paul stayed just like that, coaching Carey's breathing even as he could hear James's voice saying, "Oh shit, what's wrong with him?"

And fuck, wouldn't he like to know that too.

Slowly, too slowly, Carey felt like he gained control over his own body again. He felt exhausted, his clothes sticking to his sweat-covered skin. It took a lot of effort just to lift his head enough to see that James must have gone to the front.

Ben came over holding a few damp paper towels, smiling apologetically.

"We don't have any rags around here that you'd want to wipe your face with, even when they're freshly washed."

Carey nodded his thanks all the same, because they still felt blessedly cool against his overheated face and neck. He really needed a proper shower at this point, but this was better than nothing.

"What happened?" Ben asked. Carey shook his head, and then instantly regretted it. God, he felt like shit.

He saw Ben and Paul exchange glances, but neither of them pushed the matter, and Carey would never be able to tell them how thankful he was for it.

Instead, he thanked them both for helping him out. Ben was bashful, as always, but Paul smiled grimly.

"I got that way during car rides, for a while," he said. "It took some work to be able to go more than ten minutes in a car without feeling like I was going to be sick. I learned a few tricks along the way."

He patted Carey's shoulder. "Feel free to go home if you want, James can handle the front until Kuzya comes in. It'll do him some good to work for a living again."

With that, he headed to the ovens to check on whatever was baking, effectively ending the conversation.

Ben was still at Carey's shoulder, brows pinched in concern.

"Do you want to go home? I can drive you, if you don't feel up to it."

He didn't ask for Paul's permission to leave halfway through his shift, but Paul didn't correct him, either.

Carey was about to say no, that he was fine, that he didn't need any help...but his car was parked right outside the shop, and it felt conspicuously recognizable even if it did have Tennessee plates now. It already seemed a miracle that PK hadn't recognized it on his way in, but Carey coming out to move it would certainly draw attention. He also wasn't quite so sure he could drive home safely right now, but that was another matter.

"Where are you parked?" he croaked, like that was the sort of question you asked in these situations.

"Down a few blocks," Ben said apologetically, "But I can pull the car around."

"No." Carey slid to his feet, holding onto the counter until he could trust his legs not to betray him. "That's fine. We'll go out the back."

Ben, bless him, dumped his apron on the counter and pulled out his keys.

~~~

Showing an unusual level of tact, or perhaps following a scolding by Paul, nobody ever asked Carey what had happened that day. James asked how he was doing, and Kuzya gave him an uncharacteristically solemn, "Hope you feel better now," but nobody tried to make him explain what had made him freak out so badly.

He had never been more grateful to call them his friends.

He also happened to hear that PK had finished his tour of Nashville and wasn't due back until sometime shortly before training camp, whenever he was planning to actually move houses.

It was a huge relief to know that things could finally go back to normal at work, so it was really rather ridiculous that some strange part of him was disappointed.

At this point, after having taken the time to try to think things through rationally at home, where he wasn't at risk of spilling boiling water on himself or hyperventilating in front of his coworkers, Carey was able to lay out the facts of the situation:

1\. Whatever control the NDA had over him or over PK, it had become null and void as soon as PK was traded. Montreal had no leverage anymore. PK's career was in the hands of David Poile and the Nashville Predators.

2\. The Predators organization was aware of Rich Clune's gay relationship, and was to Carey's knowledge entirely accepting of it. Rich never made any effort to hide his relationship, even if he didn't talk about it on social media, and a guy who had a gag order from his employers would usually be a bit more closeted than holding hands while walking down a public street.

3\. PK Subban had come into Carey's workplace and was now aware that it existed. While he likely still had no clue that Carey worked there, he knew about Herb's Electronics and there was now a good possibility that he'd come there again.

4\. Carey still very much had feelings for PK, as evidenced by how affected he'd been just by seeing a glimpse of him through a window. The problem was that those feelings were tie up with a whole lot of anxiety, because

5\. Carey had no idea how PK would react to seeing him again, and that was terrifying to him. All of his years of stress and starting over to protect PK, and it was now null and void with the trade. Now PK was in Nashville, after having been ghosted in the worst possible way by his long-term boyfriend. Maybe he'd moved on, maybe he hadn't, maybe he'd be overjoyed to see Carey again, maybe he'd want to punch him in the face – he had no clue what PK would do, and that was the worst part of it.

They'd used to be so in synch that they didn't need words between them to know how the other was feeling, and now it was like PK was a stranger.

A stranger with the ability to rip Carey's heart right out of his chest, if he wanted. And he'd deserve it. There was no way that he could get PK to see that leaving him had been for the best, not when he must have been hurt so badly.

He had to make a plan for when he saw PK again – a real plan this time, not just to run away every time he thought he might see a glimpse of PK. He had to be prepared, because it would happen again, and short of looking for a new job or fleeing Nashville altogether – neither of which were things he was interested in doing, especially now that the NDA was obsolete – there was no way to avoid it.

The next time he saw PK, he would stay there and face it, whatever  _it_  ended up being. If PK wanted to yell at him, he'd accept it. If he wanted to walk out without a word, he'd accept that too. It was the least he could do, to stand his ground and deal with the pain he'd wrought.

And then, when it was over, he would lick his wounds in peace, and comfort himself with the notion that at least the worst was over, and now he could finally stop waiting for the worst to happen, because it had already come to pass.

~~~

Carey did absolutely none of those things. Stolid plans were all well and good when considered in a vacuum, but meant absolutely nothing in the heat of the moment. It was only the second week of August when he caught sight of Ryan Johansen shoving through the front door, talking to someone behind him.

He heard a laugh, heart-breakingly familiar, and shoved his current customer's mug at her so hard he just barely avoided sloshing half her drink across the counter.

"Have a good day," he muttered. She was distracted, already having noticed Johansen, and Carey was absolutely not prepared to deal with any of this situation.

He'd prepared himself for this, he'd told himself he was going to stand his ground, and now he was going to go hide in the kitchen because suddenly it was feeling very hard to breathe again.

This time he went to the right of the door, away from the wall of ovens, pressing himself against the cool drywall and trying to remember what Paul had told him about measuring his breaths.

The door was thin, and so as he stood there panting, he could hear the customer he'd just helped talking to Johansen and PK, telling them how excited she was for the next season. PK laughed again, bright and happy.

Carey shuddered, the sound carrying down his spine. It had been so long since he'd heard him, it was almost too much to handle.

PK was happy. He couldn't – he didn't want to ruin that. Upsetting PK by being there would ruin that.

"Aw, where's Scary?" he could hear Johansen say. "He's usually here in the mornings. Otherwise Cluner's boyfriend makes the coffee, and that's more like a punishment than a treat."

Another laugh, because PK was going to kill him slowly. "I met him last time I was here. Are you sure his coffee doesn't make him the scary one?"

"Nah, man, wait till you meet Scary. One time Fifi tried to order a frappuccino and he just stared at him until Fifi actually started to apologize for not paying attention to the sign."

"There's a sign?"

They must have been examining the sign that was put up for James's sake, limiting the types of drinks that they served so that nobody had to suffer through James trying to make them. The only thing that had changed with Carey and Kuzya coming on was that they would now serve steeped teas – Carey was more than happy to keep on refusing to make anything involving ice, pour-overs, and the word "frap," just because he could. It was the principle of the thing.

While they were distracted talking about the sign, he took that as his cue to go to James's office, knocking on the doorframe because the door itself was rarely shut anyway.

"Your boyfriend's teammates are out front," he said by way of greeting.

James's head popped up from where he'd been squinting at his computer screen, his glasses propped on top of his head.

"Dick's here? He said he wouldn't be around till after noon..."

"Not him. Other ones. Put your glasses back on before you ruin your eyes even more."

James froze for a moment and patted the top of his head, like he'd forgotten his glasses were even there. He muttered a curse to himself and put them on, blinking owlishly as the words on his computer undoubtedly started to make more sense.

"Oh. Wait, who is it then?"

It was unlikely that James would notice how Carey couldn't look him directly in the eye, but it felt damning.

"Johansen and Subban." He swallowed, feeling his throat get tight around the words. He wasn't sure he'd said PK's name out loud in two years.

"And...do you not...like them?"

It was a fair question, but not one that Carey could answer easily.

"You should help them."

James made a face. "I mean, one of us definitely should, but they'd probably prefer it was you."

"No, you should do it."

One of the benefits of being accepted as enigmatic and impassive was that Carey could get away with making declarations without having to explain himself, and for the most part his coworkers didn't really question him that much. Oh, they might  _have_  questions, but they would usually keep them to themselves and just do as he'd asked.

It was probably a bit more power than he should have when his job description said he was a barista, but he wasn't about to say anything to stop them.

"Okay..." James made sure to express his confusion with a variety of frowns and eyebrow movements, but he still got up and went to the front.

Well. That had gone better than Carey had expected.

"That was weird, even for you."

When he turned, Paul was entirely focused on laying the top crust on a cherry pie, but it was clear that he was talking to Carey.

Carey shrugged; Paul couldn't see it, but he was sure Paul knew what he'd done anyway.

~~~

Carey's already less-than-stellar coping skills rapidly declined after that.

The third time PK came in, it was on his own. The only thing that saved Carey that time was that he'd gone to the fridge in the kitchen to grab fresh cream. As he went towards the door to the front he could hear that same familiar laugh again, and he'd nearly fled on the spot. Luckily it was just around shift-change, and Kuzya was there in the kitchen putting on his apron.

He pressed the bottle of cream into his hands and said, "I think you'll want to take this one."

It was a little cathartic to bodily shove Kuzya towards the door, to be honest, but he didn't feel too badly about it because a moment later he could hear Kuzya's rapid-fire speech as he grilled PK about what it was like to play with Markov and Emelin.

Okay, then he  _did_  almost feel bad, because he could have told Kuzya about them years ago, if he'd been honest about who he was. But he wasn't a player, hadn't really been a part of the team. It was better to hear it from PK.

He told himself that there was no shame in hiding out in the kitchen for the rest of his shift, helping Ben make cut-outs. He was still doing work, technically, and it would be rude to interrupt Kuzya's conversation with PK by dramatically reappearing in PK's life just as Kuzya was asking him about the Olympics.

Carey really had no excuse for what happened the fourth time.

It was the first day of training camp for the Preds, and they all knew that Rich was planning on bringing in some of the guys after they were released for the day.

That was fine. Carey's shift would be just finishing up then and he could probably make it out a few minutes early to avoid them. He'd even parked down the street preemptively so that he could head out the back and avoid anyone seeing his car in front of the bakery.

He didn't know how Nashville ran their first day of camp, but he wanted to have a very stern talk with their athletic trainers because there was no reason for a full cadre of hockey players to be coming into his shop at one in the afternoon. That was just poor form, they should still be getting forced to do lunges and pull-ups until even the thought of eating made them want to vomit.

And really, it was the first day of camp. They had no business being in a bakery.

Clearly Clune was a horrible influence.

But Carey's professional outrage couldn't keep them from coming in any more than his objections to their dietary choices.

They came as a pack. That was his only saving grace, that Forsberg and Arvidsson were the first two entering the shop, with Järnkrok just behind.

"Hey, Scary," Arvidsson said. James insisted they all just called him that as a nickname because "that's how hockey players are," but Carey would bet his paycheck for the week that they had no clue that it wasn't his real name because that's what it said on his name tag. That was, he knew for a fact, also how hockey players are.

Carey made a point of looking at the door, where Fiala was peering around hesitantly like Carey might try to maul him if he asked for a non-menu item again. He could see Ryan Ellis just behind Fiala, prodding him in the back to get him out of the way.

"Is your whole team here?" he asked Arvidsson. He kept his face carefully impassive, but his gaze was pinned on the windows. Ekholm, Irwin, Johansen...there was no way PK wasn't in on this.

"Pretty much, you guys are popular."

Arvidsson was smiling because he thought this was a good thing. To be fair, Carey couldn't blame him for not knowing that this was making his life hell.

"Okay."

Carey nodded, turned around, and went directly for James's office.

Leaning in the door, he announced, "Your boyfriend brought his whole team to visit. You should help them."

James frowned, scrunching up his face in that way that made him look like he'd just eaten something awful after being told that he shouldn't eat it but doing it anyway.

"I mean, I'll help out, I guess, because that's a lot of people, but I don't think-"

Carey cut him off.

"This is probably morally reprehensible of me but I need to leave now."

"Wait, what?  _Now_? You can't just-"

"Sorry, has to be now. I have places to be."

Ex-boyfriends to avoid.

James was frowning even more, probably because Carey was forcing him to actually act managerial for once. He didn't look like he was enjoying it.

"Dude, your shift isn't over for like, another hour, you're our front-end coverage. You didn't say you had an appointment, you can't just leave without warning."

Carey paused in thought, canting his head to the side. "Is this not a warning?"

"Not when you just told me there's like twenty people out there!" James yelped. Carey was fairly sure it was the thought of having to try to make them coffee that bothered him more than Carey trying to leave early, but that still didn't solve his problem.

"Yeah, but I can't do it, so." He shrugged. Usually that was enough to settle things.

James narrowed his eyes.

"I'm going to need an actual reason why. Like, your whole, Carey-ness thing that you have going on is great, but you can't just ghost me like that at the last second without a really good reason."

It was on the tip of Carey's tongue, another bullshit excuse, talking circles around James until he just gave up and let Carey have what he wanted. He didn't do it often, but he knew it was possible.

But James was good to him, he always had been. He hired Carey when all he'd been able to show was a suspiciously blank resume and an application for a work visa. Nobody in their right mind would have given Carey a chance with that type of sketchiness, but James had taken it all in stride. He always had.

Unbidden, he thought back to James helping him with the burn on his hand. How pleased he was to look after Carey, how much it meant to him to be able to help out his friends.

It had been a long, long time since Carey had someone on his side, someone he could trust. Things had only been getting worse, could only get worse from here. Even if he got out of things today, it would keep happening, and one day James wouldn't feel so forgiving – no employer would, no matter how kind they were.

Carey glanced behind him at Paul and Ben, who gave the air of not listening but had undoubtedly heard the entire exchange. He took a step into James's office and closed the door behind him. The sound of the latch clicking gave his decision a sense of finality.

It sounded like relief.

"What I'm going to tell you doesn't leave this room," he said slowly, "I need you to promise me that. I'm...I'm figuring things out, but right now I need you to promise me that you aren't going to tell anyone what I'm about to tell you. Not Paul, not Clune, not your mom – nobody."

James was frowning again, but this time more like when Carey had burned himself – like the idea that something could rattle Carey upset him.

"Carey, if you're in some sort of trouble..."

"I'm not – I'm not in trouble. Not...whatever I was involved in, it's all done now. Look, I'll explain it all better later, but right now we have very little time before your boyfriend comes back here looking for us and I need you to promise me you won't say anything to him about this."

James still looked upset, but he was already nodding, quick and firm. "Yeah, yeah, of course."

The thing about James was that for as forgetful and clumsy as he could be, he really was a smart guy, and he was painfully sincere. If James gave his word, he kept it.

Carey sighed, nodded. God, he didn't remember life always being this exhausting, and he used to work long hours babysitting a professional hockey team.

"The short version of events is that I used to work for the Habs, and I used to date PK Subban."

James's eyes went owlishly wide.

Carey smiled grimly. "As you can imagine that didn't go over well with management when they found out. I signed a shady deal to break up with him and leave Montreal to protect his career. Literally nobody has a clue where I've been for the past two years, not even my family, and definitely not PK. I'm still figuring out what I'm doing now that he's in Nashville, but for right now, I really don't know how he'd react to seeing me but I don't think it would go over well in front of his entire team, and that's why I really, really need you to go out there and handle things."

He would have to start praying to whatever deity was kind enough to bless him with James Neal, because James just blinked away his surprise, nodded, and said, "Well that sounds super fucked-up, Care-bear. Okay, we'll fix this."

"Never call me that again."

James ignored him, already moving around him to head into the kitchen. He called out, "Ben, c'mon, I'm deputizing you into the coffee-making business!"

_"What?"_

James clapped Ben on the shoulder, ignoring his protests to steer him towards the door. "We're all about building well-rounded employees here, so you're going to learn how to help make coffee."

"From  _you_?"

"We're learning from my mistakes!" James said with forced cheer, propelling him towards the door. Paul was watching the whole proceeding with interest, which indicated just how truly strange it really was.

James looked over his shoulder at Carey just before he reached the door.

"Go home, man," he said in a low voice, "It's cool. We'll talk it over in the morning."

Carey didn't know what he'd done to deserve a friend like James Neal, but he vowed that he wasn't going to waste the opportunity he'd been given.

When he got home, the first thing he did was call his parents.

"Mom? Hey, so I was thinking, I wanted to come visit you guys for Thanksgiving next month, if it's not too short-notice..."

~~~

James took the whole story remarkably well. Not that Carey had expected him to react poorly – he couldn't imagine much of anything he could say to James that would actually piss him off – but it was definitely a pretty dramatic and far-fetched story. Carey imagined that he would be a little skeptical, hearing it from someone else.

Then again, he was fairly sure that James and Paul had their own dramatic backstory tucked away somewhere, in with Paul's limp and the shortness of James's breath. Maybe it took one to know one.

"Well," James said, slouching back in his desk chair. He was usually slouching, so now it just looked like his chin was creeping ever-closer to desk-height. It probably wrought hell on whatever was wrong with his chest, but James never seemed to care. "If it wasn't probably an OSHA violation and also not even six in the morning, I would offer you a beer right now, because a story like that deserves one. I don't have beer down here, but I do have..."

He squinted at the haphazard pile of half-empty cases of pop in the corner of his office.

"Room-temperature Cherry Coke Zero and diet Canada Dry."

Carey made a face. "At 5:30 in the morning?"

James shrugged, entirely unbothered.

"Hey, we all have our vices."

"But it's all  _diet_."

"Did you not just finish telling me about how you were an athletic trainer? Lay off my healthy choices, man."

Things weren't terribly different, now that James knew. He didn't make jokes about it or try to get Carey to share anything more with him. For the most part everything continued on as normal.

Everything, that was, except for where PK was involved.

Apparently, PK had somehow gotten it in his head that he very much wanted to meet "Scary," also referred to as "the competent one" and by his more neutral teammates, "the morning barista."

Carey knew all of this because he heard PK asking James about him while he camped out next to the door in the kitchen, not even pretending that he wasn't trying to eavesdrop. He'd all but somersaulted through the door in an attempt to avoid PK spotting him, but now that the initial adrenaline was gone...

He just really missed PK's voice.

"All the guys say he's supposed to be really good, but whenever I show up it looks like I've just missed him."

"Oh, yeah," he could hear James saying. Carey couldn't see it, but he was sure James was probably nodding vigorously. "Yeah, that happens sometimes."

"Is he here today? All the hype about him, it sucks that I've never once actually gotten to meet the guy. The boys say some of the kids are afraid of him."

"That  _is_  why he's called Scary," James agreed. Carey was pretty sure it was more because someone (Kuzya) had thought it would be hilarious if they all (read: just Carey) had Halloween-themed name tags nearly two years ago, but he wasn't about to go correct anybody. His name tag was almost back in season again.

Besides, anything was better than "Care-bear."

James never did actually tell PK where he was that day, which was actually rather impressive. Carey paid him back later by helping him load a large delivery of fall-themed cookies into the back of his car.

"What are you going to tell him when he pushes you for an answer?" he couldn't help asking.

James shrugged, completely unbothered as he consulted his clipboard to make sure he had everything.

"That your shift just ended."

"But what if he comes in at eight in the morning?"

James stared at him over the clipboard like he was dumb, but still cute.

That was the look that Carey usually gave James. He wasn't sure how he felt being on the receiving end of it.

"I tell him that your shift just ended."

"At  _eight_?"

"What can I say, Carey, your shifts are a thing of wonder."

Of course PK didn't actually take that as an answer, but James still worked to sell it like he was earning a commission at QVC.

"So he's avoiding me," was PK's response, the first time James told him that Carey had already gone home by 7:12 in the morning. Carey was once again camped out by the door. Someone had left a stool there for what he suspected was exactly that purpose, but when he'd asked, Ben and Paul both acted like he was crazy.

"I take good care of my employees, Mr. Subban," he heard James say primly. "I work with their internal clocks. And sometimes those internal clocks say that seven in the morning is a good time to pack up and go home. Your latte."

"...Dude. I'm pretty sure this is like, espresso with regular milk in it."

"Is it, Mr. Subban?  _Is it_?"

"It is, it's actually cold."

" _Is it, Mr. Subban_?"

Most people would stop coming in after an experience like that, but PK just had to take it as a challenge.

"Rich asked me why we're fucking around with his defensemen," James pouted a few days later, slumping against one of the kitchen workbenches. Paul silently handed him a piping bag of black icing and steered him towards a series of round frosted cookies awaiting faces.

"Maybe because you guys are fucking around with his defensemen?" Ben suggested. His voice was a little tight, and he didn't look up from the flour he was sifting.

Carey frowned. Ben had been a little...off, lately. He was sure it was his own fault – after all, Carey was running around, clearly sharing some sort of secret with James, while leaving everyone in the dark. Ben had never asked what was happening and he probably never would, but that didn't mean Carey couldn't tell he wanted to know. And if Carey was going to confide in anyone, it was usually Ben.

He wasn't used to feeling out of step around Ben. It kind of sucked.

"Just the one defenseman," James countered, squinting down at his smiley faces in concentration. "And he'll get over it, once he chooses to stop coming in."

Ben tossed his sifter down on the table, the clatter loud enough to make everyone jump.

"I just don't get it," he said. He sounded...frustrated. Maybe even angry. Carey didn't think he'd ever seen Ben like that before – and never directed at himself. "What's your problem with him? You won't even make the guy a cup of coffee, and now you have James trying to run him out of the store. Do you just not like him as a player or something? Or is this like, like a race thing?"

Oh, fuck, but that was so far from the truth.

"Fuck, no, and fuck you for even thinking that."

It burned, being compared to those people, the ones who treated PK like he was somehow  _less_. He'd been right there with PK in the playoffs against Boston a few years ago, seething on PK's behalf because a guy like PK couldn't be seen getting mad at shitty fans, no matter what they said about him. And Carey had been there during the rest of the year too, hearing the shit that was slung at PK on a regular basis.

Ben at least had the grace to look remorseful. "I'm sorry, you don't deserve that. But you guys have to admit it looks a little conspicuous when even the guy's teammates know that you're avoiding him in particular for no good reason."

It did look bad, and clearly it was making PK feel bad on some level if he was actually bringing it up around his teammates. Carey felt a pang of remorse, until he considered how PK would feel in the event that he found out just who was avoiding him.

He wouldn't be so keen to meet Carey then.

"I can't really give you a reason," he finally said. Ben opened his mouth, clearly about to protest, but Carey held up a hand to cut him off.

"You know how we all have this unspoken agreement where we don't ask each other certain things?" He looked around him, being sure to make eye contact with both James and Paul before he landed back on Ben. "Well, I'm speaking it right now. This is one of those things that I can't tell you. Just trust me when I say that it's to his benefit that he doesn't have to interact with me, even if he doesn't know it."

He'd thought about it more, since PK started coming in regularly looking for him – it was just about all he thought about anymore. And even if there was the slightest chance that PK might be happy to see him, how selfish would it be of Carey to try to reconnect with him now and turn his life upside down? Even if PK wasn't in a relationship right now, whatever pain he'd experienced due to Carey, he'd clearly been able to move past it. He looked happy. He looked good.

He didn't need Carey shoving his way back into his life on the off-chance that he might actually welcome it.

The past was best left in the past. Nashville was their present now, and in Nashville they lived two definitively separate lives.

Carey had been the one to cause that separation. It wasn't his place to try to force them together again.

He stared at Ben, willing him to understand, the way that he always did, that even if Carey couldn't give him the full truth, Carey was being as honest as he possibly could. This was how they worked: Carey didn't ask about anyone else's past, and they didn't ask about his.

Fuck, he wasn't even sure he knew Ben's real birthday.

Ben frowned, watching him with troubled eyes for far too long, before he finally relented with a nod.

"Okay," he said quietly, picking up the sifter again. "Okay. I trust you."

Carey smiled.

~~~

Someone on the team must have told PK when Carey's shift usually ended, because he started hanging around during shift change, that damnable smile on his face and his hands casually tucked in his pockets, telling James or Kuzya or Ben or whatever sacrificial lamb who was shoved to the front in Carey's stead that he was just waiting to catch "the competent one" on his way out.

"Guy's starting to sound like a myth!" he'd teased. "Thought I'd tried to catch him when his shift ended."

He'd actually winked at James that time, which Carey knew because James had given him the full play-by-play via text later.

Carey hadn't stayed to eavesdrop that day. He'd snuck out the back.

This had worked maybe twice, before Ben had taken a bag of garbage to the dumpster out back and found PK casually lounging against the wall playing with his phone.

"Come here often?" he'd asked Ben, waggling his eyebrows. Nobody had told Carey that part, but he knew exactly what PK looked like when uttering those words. He'd certainly heard it enough times.

James had given Rich a thoroughly bland and entirely unimpressed speech on keeping his teammates "out of our garbage and all of our garbage-adjacent facilities, thanks."

Carey's saving grace was his trip to visit his family for Thanksgiving. His parents had been absolutely beside themselves when he said he was coming home. They nearly had him in tears along with them by the end of the call.

His sister had called him, afterwards, and told him with a shaking voice that she loved him and she couldn't wait to see him. It was the first time in two years that one of their conversations hadn't ended in yelling.

When James had found out about Carey's plans, he'd insisted that he take the full weekend if not the week.

"Oh my God, go, take as long as you want. The customers survived two years of my garbage all day, every day before you came along; I think they can make it through a week of getting me in the mornings. You haven't been back to the motherland in over two years, this is more important."

And so a week into the NHL season, for the first time in two years, Carey Price got on a flight to British Columbia.

~~~

Carey wasn't embarrassed to say that he cried when he saw his family waiting for him at the airport in Anahim Lake. They'd actually made a sign for him, even though there had literally only been a dozen people on his flight. It was covered in glitter, and Carey didn't have to see the way his sister was waving it around to guess at who was the culprit behind that one.

His mom was the first to hug him, tight enough to hurt, but he couldn't even feel it because he was probably clutching her just as tight, and then his sister was there, worming in against their sides, and his dad grabbed them all up in a huge bear hug. Carey was crying and his parents were crying and his sister was crying, all of them clutching each other in the airport like they hadn't seen each other in-

Well. Over two years.

He told them everything, as soon as they got home. About his relationship with PK, about management finding out, about the NDA, about moving to Nashville and working at Herb's Electronics. He left out the part about the Preds frequenting the shop – there was only so much he was willing to deal with right now – but he felt he owed it to them to explain everything else. And now that the NDA was out of the way, there wasn't really anything stopping him.

They let him tell his whole story without interrupting. Part of him was thankful because it let him get everything out in one go, but the rest of him was fucking terrified. He was sure they'd suspected he might be gay, especially considering the way his parents had always called PK his  _friend_  with that certain pause before it. But he'd never come right out and said it, and they'd never asked.

When he finished his story, they were all staring at him, expressions unreadable. The silence grew thick, oppressive. Carey could hear the clock ticking in the next room over, marking their moment of silence.

He looked up at his parents. They looked back at him. He looked down at his lap again.

"Uh. I can...maybe I should-"

"Those fucking  _assholes_!"

Carey startled as his sister's exclamation. His parents did too; his father looked ready to protest her language, but she continued, "No, seriously,  _fuck_  them, I don't care if he's not a Hab anymore, I will go to Montreal my-fucking- _self_  and rip them all a new one because they can't get away with this, they can't fucking  _do_  that!"

It was a relief to know that his sister at least was on his side, but for all of their arguments the last few years, she was the one he was least worried about taking things poorly.

But his parents...

He jumped again when his mom suddenly reached over and pulled him into a hug.

"Carey, you need to tell that boy what happened," she said against his ear. Her voice was strained, shaking, like she was on the verge of tears again, but she rubbed his back the way she always did when he was a kid and had a bad dream. This time, he wasn't sure which one of them she was comforting.

"Mom," he choked. "I..."

She cut him off. "I'm so sorry about what happened to you, and I'm so grateful that you're safe and we have you back. That's what I'm thankful for this Thanksgiving. But that boy of yours has been looking everywhere for you."

"I...what?"

His mom pulled back so that he could see her face, but she kept her hand on his shoulder. There were tears at the edges of her eyes, but she brushed them away quickly.

"He called us all the time, asking if we'd heard from you. Sweetheart, he was so worried. We told him that you'd called and you said you were safe, but we didn't know more than that. We didn't want to..."

"We thought maybe he was the reason you'd run off." His dad's voice was gruff, startlingly loud. He cleared his throat. "You never told us about your...relationship, but we'd guessed."

He swallowed visibly and nodded, almost to himself. Quieter, he continued, "I think we guessed it a long time ago. And when you...disappeared, and then he's looking everywhere for you and he says that you won't answer his calls, but you would talk to us..."

He trailed off, his fingers tightening against his thighs. Carey's mom leaned over him to briefly squeeze one of his dad's hands in her own.

"We thought maybe he was the reason you left," she said quietly. "That's why we didn't mention it to you. We thought that maybe he'd done something to scare you, or, or-"

"We thought he hurt you," his sister interrupted, "And I was more than ready to go out to Montreal and kick his ass, but he sounded really upset. He actually cried, once, Carey. I've never heard a hockey player cry over the phone, it was uncomfortable."

All of the guilt Carey had felt for abandoning PK tripled when he imagined making him cry. He was such a happy guy, even with all the shit everyone put him through, and for Carey of all people to do that to him...

"He wanted to hire a private investigator, and we were tempted to let him do it, but we didn't know for sure if you were trying to hide from him, so we talked him out of it," his dad continued. "But all this time...you gave up everything, you gave up your  _dream_  just to save his career."

The way he said it, it wasn't easy to tell what his opinion was on that. He'd put so much time and effort into helping Carey pursue hockey growing up, and when hockey was no longer an option, he'd helped put Carey through college so that he could still work with hockey players even if he couldn't be one himself. And now, to hear that his son was hiding out in Nashville as a barista, all for a guy he would never admit to his parents he was in love with, it couldn't have sat well.

And then his dad squeezed his shoulder and said in a reedy voice, "We're just so glad you're safe."

"But you do have to call him," his sister interjected. Her voice was strong, but her eyes looked suspiciously wet. "He's been through just as much as the rest of us, and he hasn't even been able to talk to you for himself. He's been worried sick, Care, and he  _still_  calls to ask about you."

The roaring in Carey's ears was louder than the tick of the clock.

"What?"

His sister exchanged a look with his mother; his mom then reached out and squeezed Carey's hand, just as she had his father's.

"He called us over the summer," she said slowly, like she was picking her words carefully. "He usually calls every month or so to check in and ask if we've heard from you. But this time he was rather..." Now she looked over at Carey's father. "... _distraught,_  because he was worried that if he sold his home in Montreal..."

Her voice got thin again, and she wiped her eyes with her spare hand.

"He was worried that you wouldn't be able to find him, if you decided to come home," she gasped, tears rolling down her cheeks now. "And so he wanted to make sure we had his new address in Nashville, so that we could give it to you, just in case."

The roaring in Carey's ears got louder, until all he could hear was the pounding of his own heart. He wanted to reach out, to hug his mom, to apologize until he couldn't speak anymore because he was so, so sorry for putting them all through this for so long, for making them worry and wonder, for making them scared. He wanted to thank them for being patient, for never giving up on him, for still loving him after what he'd done, for accepting him for who he was.

He wanted to fly back to Nashville and go up to PK's doorstep and apologize for making PK worry about him for so long when he clearly wasn't worthy of PK's love. PK deserved better than to love somebody who could torture him for so long, all while he was living his boring barista life, safe and sound in Nashville.

Carey wanted to do all of those things and so much more, but all he could do was stare at his lap, at one hand holding his mom's and the other just sitting there, useless. He couldn't move. He barely felt like he could breathe. All he could feel was his mom's hand covering his own, and his heart trying to struggle its way out of his chest.

Distantly, he could hear his sister detailing her plans to destroy the Montreal Canadiens, and he had vague thoughts that he would have to nip that in the bud later. For one thing, the players had nothing to do with running Carey out of Montreal, and so there was no actual reason to send hate-mail to Max Pacioretty, and for another, there was no way that Carey wanted to be anywhere near that kind of media circus. What was done had been done: trying to get revenge on an institution like the Habs just wasn't worth the pain and suffering, not when he was moving on with his life.

Or at least, he thought he was moving on, and then PK came back into his life and turned everything on its head.

He shouldn't have been surprised. PK had always been unexpected, right from the start – there was no reason for him to have changed just because Carey had left.

"Carey?"

He startled yet again when his dad nudged him. God, he never used to be this way before...before.

His dad's expression was apologetic, wincing like he knew how he'd affected Carey. He notably didn't comment, even though they all knew Carey had never been that jumpy in the past.

"I'm sorry, what?" Carey said. He didn't like how his voice cracked as he spoke.

"I was asking what you wanted to do now."

Carey looked around him, at his parents, his sister, all sitting there watching him with worried faces. He'd worried them all for so long, and for so little, too. A piece of paper, forced on him by some no-name businessmen who were worried about how he would ruin their brand by infecting their team with his gayness.

Fuck, but he'd fucked this up just as bad as everything with PK. There was no way he could ever truly make it up to them.

But that didn't mean he couldn't try.

Putting on a wobbly smile, he said, "Right now, I just want us to have a really nice Thanksgiving."

It wasn't an answer, but it was the right one all the same, if the smiles he received meant anything.

His sister still pulled him aside later and said, "Seriously, if you want to go nuclear on the Habs, I've got your back, all the way. We'll take this whole league down if we have to."

Carey laughed and pulled her into a hug.

It was the best holiday he'd had in years.

~~~

Leaving his family and going back to Nashville was painful. He'd had a taste of his old life in BC, of back when things were simple and his future was bright, and now he was going back to Nashville, his new normal, where everything was safe and most days were the same and nothing ever changed.

Well. Until PK came along, that is.

PK had a bad habit of making Carey's life exciting.

Speaking of PK, Carey now had his address. He'd written it down on a scrap of paper; his sister had mocked him for it, but he liked being able to feel it there in his pocket, rub his thumb over it. He wasn't sure that he would use it – he didn't want to show up at PK's house out of the blue, he'd feel horrible putting him on the spot like that, and he was still more than a little afraid that someone else might answer the door – but it felt good knowing that it was there if he wanted it.

That PK wanted him to have it, in case he wanted to come home.

He had to talk to PK. Even if it was just the once and PK never wanted to see him again, he owed him that much. PK deserved an explanation, and Carey deserved to accept whatever reaction he got in return.

He told himself to prepare for the worst, but he couldn't help feeling like the address in his pocket was a sign that maybe things would go better than he ever could have expected.

The boys gave him a hero's welcome when he returned to Herb's Electronics. Or at least James did, because he looked ready to throw down the latte he was in the midst of making to leap over the counter and give Carey a hug when he strolled into the shop around noon on his first day back in town.

"Oh thank f- God you're back," James gasped. He darted a glance at the customer at the counter, checking to see if he'd noticed James's slip. Based on his unimpressed expression, he definitely had.

Carey raised an eyebrow, settling back into his role like pulling on a comfortably worn jacket.

"Miss me?"

James cut a glance over at the customer, who was very pointedly staring at his drink, half-foamed in James's hand. "You have no idea. You want to take point on this one?"

He held the cup like an offering.

"Nope, I'm just here to check in, let you know I'm back in town." He also wasn't quite prepared to go back to his small, too-quiet apartment after the warmth of his parents' home.

Carey had never seen someone foam a latte quite so sullenly.

When the customer finally left, only after thoroughly scrutinizing the foam on his latte, James slumped across the counter with a groan. Only his fluffy hair was visible as he laid face-down on the countertop – someone must have done a public service and hidden his hair products again.

"I'm happy you got to see your family, but you can never leave me again." James's voice was muffled against the countertop, but the general air of despair was still audible.

Carey patted his head, just to see him squirm uncomfortably and swat a blind hand in his direction.

"And yet somehow you survived without me."

"Survival is right," James grumbled. He dragged himself up onto his elbows so that he could give Carey the full brunt of his miserable gaze. "On Monday a lady came in, and her eyes got all wide when she saw me and she just turned around and walked right back out. Paulie's been laughing about it all week."

Admittedly, Carey would probably laugh just as long. Hell, he was laughing right now.

"Are you suggesting that you scare your own customers away?"

James stabbed a finger at him. "That is  _exactly_  what I'm saying. We need you here to save me from the customers, and vice versa. You're doing everyone a favor just by gracing us with your Carey-ness."

"Duly noted."

He paused, considering his words. It was all too easy to guess how James would respond, if he started asking about it. But then again, he was turning over a new leaf, so it would make sense to ask about it-

"Hey, so about your, um,  _friend_." James was staring with exaggeratedly wide eyes, nodding his head like he had some sort of tic in his neck, all of which indicated his own subtle way of trying to tell Carey he was referring to PK.

Carey's eyebrow went up again.

"My friend."

"Yeah. Your friend. He, uh..." His eyes darted around the storefront, like they weren't the only ones there. "He hasn't really been around much the last few days. Or at all."

Oh. Well.

At least Carey didn't have to suck it up and ask.

He told himself that it wasn't a big deal, that he didn't care that much. He'd only been running away from PK every other time he'd come into the shop anyway, and it wasn't like PK was coming in just to see him...except those times when he was staking out the shop entirely because he was trying to see Carey.

But he was never actually there to see  _Carey_ , or at least he didn't know he was. He wanted to meet the barista, who he didn't know was actually Carey, because...

There wasn't really a reason for it. Because he was bored, probably, new in town with nothing better to do than to stalk the morning barista at his teammate's boyfriend's shop because why not?

The season was getting into full swing now, and PK would have more important things to do than to hang around trying to meet Carey. It would make sense that he'd finally stopped coming around.

"Thanks for telling me," he said.

James slowly levered himself upright, probably feeling every bit of how awful that slump had been for his chest. He was frowning, but Carey had a feeling that the frown wasn't related to muscle pain.

"I'm sure it's nothing," he said, sounding like he thought it was definitely something. "He's probably just been busy – well, I mean, they've had a lot of days off at home lately, actually, but they had a home-and-home with Chicago while you were gone, so, you know...busy..."

James's frown only got bigger and he made a pained face. "Unless you're glad he's busy, in which case, yay, no Subban?"

He made a half-hearted attempt at jazz-hands. It was pretty pathetic, but his heart was in the right place.

Carey had a lot of feelings about PK possibly giving up on meeting him – or at least, a version of him. Feelings that he wasn't sure he wanted to address with James in the middle of the bakery, especially when Ben was just coming through the kitchen door. His face lit up when he saw Carey, and he said, "Hey, welcome back! How was your trip?"

A smile worked its way across his face without his permission. Ben seemed to have that effect on everyone.

"It was great. How was dealing with Nealer?"

Ben paused halfway through reaching out to pull Carey into a hug, face twisting in dismay at whatever he was recollecting.

"Hey!" James protested, but he was summarily ignored.

Carey let Ben pull him in to his chest, one of the few times in his life that he ever felt dwarfed by someone else. Ben's grip was tight and sure, and he smelled like he'd been working with apples all morning.

"Don't go away again," Ben said, his voice loud but somehow still muffled so close to Carey's ear. "James can't take it, and we can't take James."

James started making loud noises about looking for new help as Ben pulled away, laughing.

Carey couldn't help but smile. Something in his chest settled at the display, warm and content.

Perhaps PK really was busy, or maybe he'd admitted defeat and decided to move on from tracking down the morning barista at Herb's Electronics.

That was fine. Carey would just have to track him down himself.

~~~

Telling himself that he was going to see PK was a lot easier than actually getting up and doing it. For one, he would have to do it when he could reasonably expect PK to be at home in Nashville, which wasn't an every-day occurrence. For another, he was procrastinating like Kuzya during exam week because thinking about showing up on PK's doorstep was one of the single most intimidating things he'd ever tried to imagine.

It would have been so much easier if PK was still coming into the shop, but Carey had been back for almost two weeks now and neither he nor anyone else had seen him around. Fiala had been in again, and he hadn't stuttered once when he gave Carey his order; Carey commended him on it and he'd dropped his credit card on the floor like he thought that Carey might be angry with him for getting over his fear.

Carey was trying to turn over a newer, nicer leaf, and so he waited until Fiala had scampered out the door to start laughing.

The Swedes came in, buying way too many pastries again and claiming that it totally wasn't for them, honest. Carey still watched them with visible disapproval, just to make them squirm. Clune came in too, but that wasn't really news at all when he didn't even ask permission before heading into the kitchen in search of James.

Honestly, he had a key to the back door, he should have just gone in that way and saved Carey having to give out a customer service smile before he realized who it was.

So. The Predators were definitely out and about around town. PK just wasn't coming to the shop anymore.

That was fine. It was probably better for his health not to be eating or drinking anything from the shop, anyways. In his past life, Carey would have been horrified to know his players were regulars at a place like this.

It didn't make it any easier for him to convince himself that it was a good idea to show up at PK's house two years and a thousand miles too late.

He kept the paper with PK's new address on it folded up in his pocket. It was getting wrinkled and a little worn from riding around with him all the time, from squeezing it in his palm, a gentle reminder that he had a chance. He'd googled the address, of course, mapped out so many ways that he could drive there, the turns he would have to make, alternative routes. He was painfully aware of the exact distance between himself and PK's house at any given time, but that awareness was never enough to spur him into action.

It was so much easier to ache from afar.

After so long, the ache had become comfortable. Normal. He wasn't sure what it would feel like not to ache anymore.

Some nights, when he lie awake in the dark of his room, rubbing his thumb over the address for the thousandth time, he thought that maybe he wasn't worthy of that type of absolution.

But this wasn't about him. This was about PK, about letting PK know that he was okay and letting the chips fall where they may. This was for PK's sake, because he deserved to be able to move on with his life, whether that was with Carey or not.

The address stayed in Carey's pocket, and Carey stayed in his normal routine, far away from PK.

~~~

Carey didn't usually read the order log. Special orders weren't at all in his job description, and his only interaction with them was to show the customer the cake binder while he grabbed James or Paul from the back. Sometimes he brought their order out to the front when they came to pick it up from the shop, but the only thing that entailed was checking their receipt and going to the back to grab the associated boxes.

Keeping track of the order log, a slightly rumpled-looking black binder cataloguing all current orders and their associated order forms, was James's job, as were deliveries. It was by pure chance that Carey had felt magnanimous enough to help James load up the orders for a bachelorette party and two children's birthdays one Friday just as his shift was ending and he handed the front over to Kuzya.

"Harcrow has...two boxes," he told James, who was pawing around in the freezer. Really, James should have been the one trying to read his own cramped handwriting, but Carey would rather do that than stand in the freezer, even if the kitchen was swelteringly hot by comparison.

"Cake and a tray of cupcakes."

James made what might have been a grunt of agreement, or of disgust, or just a general grunt.

Children's birthday cakes were getting bigger every year.

"Okay." James dropped the boxes down gently on the table nearest the freezer, even though he looked like he would much rather be dropping them. "Who else?"

"Carcher is one box, a cake, I think it's on the top shelf. And the last one is..."

Carey squinted down at the page. "Snake? Snack? I have no clue what that's supposed to say."

He flipped to the  _S_  tab of the binder. There were only two sets of forms in there. The first clearly wasn't anything like Snake or Snack or Snark, and Carey would have just skipped right past it, except something in his brain had become a little too attuned to that particular address after reading it so many times. The words seemed to jump off the page at him, daring him not to take notice.

That was PK's new address.

Something in Carey's stomach swooped in excitement. He couldn't tell if it was different from whatever told him to go lose his lunch in the bathroom.

The top of the page didn't have PK's name. It said  _P.K.S._ , which wasn't exactly incorrect, per se, but it was not at all how they wrote order names here...not unless they were trying to keep someone from recognizing who the order was for.

There was only one person that they might not want to know about PK placing an order with the bakery.

"Here's Carcher," James panted, staggering out of the freezer and stacking the box with the others. "Let me see the last one, isn't it something like Snape, Snare?"

He grabbed the binder out of Carey's hands, squinting down at the page. Carey watched as his eyes got wide in realization, and he quickly flipped to the next order behind it, like maybe that would have kept Carey from figuring it out. Admittedly, maybe it would have, if Carey hadn't known exactly who that address belonged to.

"...Shaler. Huh. That wasn't close at all."

Normally, Carey would have chirped James about his horrible handwriting, but normally, he wouldn't have suspected that his boss was trying to keep him from finding out something about his ex-boyfriend.

"PK placed an order." He only just barely remembered to pitch his voice low enough that Paul and Ben couldn't hear him from the other side of the room.

James had a historically poor poker face, and so even he probably knew that there was little chance of Carey believing his wide-eyed surprise.

He dropped it within seconds.

"You saw," he said.

"The form said the order was placed last week."

Carey didn't bother to tack on his real question; James heard it all the same.

He sighed and looked away, across the kitchen where Ben was diligently cutting out cookies shaped like ghosts and pumpkins.

"Yeah."

He started shifting around uncomfortably when Carey didn't say anything. James never did well with silence.

"Okay, yeah, he came in to order a bunch of Halloween-themed stuff. Cupcakes and cookies, mostly, finger food. I think he's having some sort of party after the team gets back from their road trip."

That wouldn't really be surprising – PK loved Halloween because he loved any opportunity to dress up, and he was always the first to invite people over, even if he was the one new to the area.

The surprising part was that James thought that Carey for some reason couldn't be trusted with that knowledge. Honestly, Carey was surprised he'd been able to keep it a secret for this long without Carey even picking up on something being off.

"And you thought you had to keep that secret from me because...?"

James wouldn't meet his eyes, which would have been a dead indicator that something was wrong even if his smile had been convincing.

"It's nothing. I'd just thought...you had been trying to avoid him for so long, I didn't want to stress you out. You're right, it was stupid not to be honest. It's not really that big of a deal, hockey players buy stuff from us all the time."

His eyes flicked up to meet Carey's.

"It's not a big deal, right?"

Carey didn't know if he was asking or telling. He nodded anyway.

"It's not. I want to do the delivery."

"Wait, what? No, fuck, no, you can't, because-"

Carey felt like his eyebrow perpetually lived halfway up his forehead when he was around James.

"Because why, you love doing deliveries on Sundays when your boyfriend's in town?"

It was two days away. That would be enough time for Carey to get his shit together before he saw PK. He had to get it over with eventually.

James was sputtering, as was his wont, but it was loud enough that Paul was giving them cursory glances, which meant they were putting on a bit of a show already.

"James," Carey said lowly, his eyes darting at the other two across the room. "Just let me do this. I've been trying to get myself to go see him for weeks, this is my excuse. I'll drop off the order, I'll apologize and get it all over with...please, I need to do this."

He could tell that James didn't want to say yes – his mouth was already open and ready to protest – but he must have seen something in Carey's eyes, or his face, because he deflated like he'd had his strings cut.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" he asked miserably, like Carey had just volunteered to skip merrily to the gallows instead of delivering desserts to his ex-boyfriend on his day off.

Carey nodded. "I just have to do this, and then..."

And then. Wasn't that the issue. Nobody quite knew what would happen  _and then_ , except for one PK Subban.

Carey was anxious to find out.

When James sighed, it was like he was signing a death warrant.

"Fine," he mumbled. "You can drop it off. It's not...it's not a huge deal. Just...be careful?"

Carey tried to get a read on him, but he just looked weary, exhausted.

He nodded. "I'll be fine. You need to sleep more."

James laughed like it had been startled out of him, but his eyes stayed serious. It was like he was cringing, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

It took Carey a long time to fall asleep that night.

~~~

Carey prided himself on being perceptive, but he'd always had blinders when it came to PK. He'd told PK that once, and PK had smiled at him, wide and so bright it hurt, and told him that his sparkling personality was just so luminous that you had to wear shades just to be around him.

To hear him say it, it had almost sounded reasonable.

PK could make just about anything sound reasonable. Or maybe that was just because Carey was in love with him.

Two years of absence had done nothing to rid Carey of that blind spot, or maybe he would have guessed at why James might have been so nervous about Carey taking the order.

PK's new house was in a beautiful neighborhood. Clean, spacious homes far too big for a single family in a tidy suburb well away from the city center. It wasn't the apartment of the young bachelor or the guy who wasn't sure how long he'd be staying in town – it was the home of someone looking to settle in and put down roots.

It was the type of place a guy would buy when he was ready to start setting up a family, and that should have been his second clue, if James had been his first.

There were Halloween decorations on the manicured lawn, furry spiders and foam tombstones, the type that PK had loved to look at in stores but had never been able to buy when he lived in an apartment back in Montreal. Apparently he was taking full advantage of all of his new opportunities in Nashville.

Carey had looked up PK's address before, and so he knew his house was ridiculously nice, but that still didn't prepare him for just how  _big_  it was. There were only two stories, but the peak of the house made it look like it could be three. It had an attached three-car garage that probably would have fit the entirety of Carey's apartment with room to spare. Windows covered the front of the house, but the real eye-catcher was the full, Southern-style wrap-around porch. It came complete with white railings that were currently covered in fake cobwebs, and a set of oversized patio chairs were currently home to a pair of plastic skeletons wearing Preds jerseys and cowboy hats.

It wasn't subtle, but it was very PK.

Carey felt a pang in his chest, looking at it all. It wasn't the house that did it – that was more house than any one family could ever need, let alone a single person – but it was the porch. He'd once told PK that he'd always wanted a porch like that, lying in bed in Montreal, talking about having a real life together and other fanciful impossibilities.

He knew that PK wouldn't have bought the house with him in mind – he probably didn't even remember the conversation, it had been the middle of the night well over two years ago after a game that had gone into overtime, when they were both delirious with exhaustion – but he couldn't help but feel that it was some sort of sign from the universe telling him that he was making the right choice.

If only he'd been able to heed all of the other signs telling him the opposite.

He didn't park in the driveway – it felt like a step too far, a familiarity that he hadn't earned the right to have yet, even if he was technically here on business. It took him a few minutes to calm himself enough to get out of the car, and another to make his hands stop shaking enough that he trusted himself to carry the boxes up the curving driveway.

Carey could feel his heart pounding as he slowly walked up the three short pumpkin-lined steps to the wooden porch. It creaked invitingly under his feet. He shuffled the boxes around just enough that he could hit the doorbell with his knuckle.

Maybe he should put the boxes down? He wasn't sure how PK would react – shit, he wasn't sure how  _he_  would react – but if PK wanted to hit him or something, it was probably best that his desserts didn't get ruined in the process. He was paying for them, after all.

He was just going to sit them down on the porch when he heard footsteps padding closer to the front door. He straightened up again, the boxes held tightly to his chest either in offering or for protection.

Carey bit his lip, trying to decide if it would be bad to smile, trying to remind himself that he had to  _breathe_  or else smiling would be the least of his worries, and then the knob was turning, and the door was opening, and-

The first thing he noticed was that the woman had red hair. It fell just to her shoulders in perfect, shimmering ringlets, naturally blessed with the type of hairstyle that other women would pay hundreds to get in a salon.

The second thing he noticed was that she was beautiful, and she was smiling, and she was most definitely not PK.

This had to be the right house, he'd looked up the address enough times, but maybe google maps was wrong? Maybe he'd misread the number somehow, he hadn't checked the mailbox all that closely.

"I'm sorry, I must have the wrong house," he said, the aftermath of all of that unspent adrenaline making him feel weak and dull. "I have-"

"Oh, are those the cupcakes? I'm so excited, everyone's been telling me about your bakery, they say it's the best."

Her eyes were green, and her chin was pointed and sharp. She looked almost like a pixie, small and bright and beautiful, and Carey kept getting distracted trying to figure out what she was doing here.

"Yeah, sorry. I have cupcakes and, uh, cookies, I think."

He was wondering if he should give the boxes to her or if he was still in some alternate universe where he somehow had the wrong house, but she was already taking the boxes out of his hands and sitting them on the long table against the wall of the hallway behind her.

"That sounds exactly right," she said, still smiling. "Is there anything I need to sign?"

In a daze, he offered her the clipboard he'd had pinned under his arm. She seemed to know better than him what the protocol was here.

He didn't know how all of his plans and daydreams had never accounted for this scenario, where PK's baked goods were possibly stolen by his neighbor, or someone living in an identical house.

He really did lose all of his common sense when it came to PK, because when he heard his voice call from deeper inside the house, "Babe, is that the order from the bakery?", for a moment he thought that PK was speaking to him.

"Yep!" she called back down the hall, her voice as bright as her smile. She handed the clipboard back to Carey with a chipper, "Here you go," seemingly unperturbed by his slack grip and pale face.

He'd accounted for this scenario, he realized. He'd wondered again and again about if PK had moved on, if he'd found someone new and fallen in love with someone worthy of his time and affection, someone good and kind who he could take out in public without fear of ruining his career.

He'd just been stupid enough to hold onto that scrap of an address in his pocket and think that it meant something more than words on a tattered piece of paper.

PK had left him a forwarding address as a courtesy he didn't do anything to deserve.

It wasn't an invitation to come home. Carey didn't really have a home, anymore.

In all of his excitement about seeing PK, he'd forgotten that.

He wouldn't make that mistake again.

"Is that Cluner's boy?' he heard PK call. He sounded like he was getting closer.

The woman opened her mouth to say something, but Carey cut her off before she could speak. God, she really was perfect. She was the sort of person PK deserved.

"Thank you for your business," he said quickly.

He didn't try to smile, because he didn't think it would come out right, and he didn't wait for her response before he jumped down the steps in one leap and jogged to his car.

He drove away before PK ever had the chance to get to the door.

His apartment was hot and stuffy, far warmer than it had the right to be at the end of October. He told himself that that was why it felt difficult to breathe. Then when the lightheaded feeling came, along with the dizziness that made him slump down the wall until he hit the floor, he told himself that it was because he hadn't drank enough water today. And when he was sweating and shaking on the floor, tears in his eyes, gasping for breath and asking himself why he'd ever thought PK would want someone who fell apart like this, he told himself that this was a favorable alternative to PK having seen him today.

PK had a new life now, a happy one with a new girlfriend. The last thing he needed was his broken, runaway ex-boyfriend reappearing in his life after two years with nothing to offer but a box of desserts and a head full of anxieties.

He wouldn't try to see PK again.

Later that night he called his sister to tell her that PK had moved on. He chose her over his parents because he knew she wouldn't argue with him or try to make him think it was all some sort of misunderstanding. Under her bravado she had always been a realist, like him.

When she asked if this meant he would leave Nashville and come home to Canada, he said he might.

There wasn't a whole lot left for him here.

~~~

James never said anything about it, but Carey could tell from the sorry look on his face the next morning that he'd known exactly what Carey would find at PK's house and had been trying to protect him from it. He couldn't even bring himself to be mad at James for treating him with kid gloves.

He would never admit it to anyone but himself, but he felt terrifyingly fragile lately. Brittle, maybe, like all it would take was one wrong touch for him to shatter.

Yesterday, it had felt like a part of him had broken off that he might not be able to glue back together.

There was a difference between theoretically considering that PK could move on and seeing the shining, lovely proof of it with his own eyes.

The visit with his parents had let him get his hopes up, something he never should have done in the first place. He knew better than to hold out hope that PK would have waited around for him. He'd been gone for two years after dumping PK by text and running off. Nobody would wait for someone like that for a week, let alone two years.

PK may have felt obligated to make sure that Carey was okay, but that didn't mean he wanted him back in his life.

Carey couldn't fault him for that. He only had himself to blame.

It hurt to think, but he told himself that the more he pressed on that pain, the more it would scar; in the end it would be dull and numb, and he wouldn't feel so much anymore.

Maybe one day, many years from now, he'd be able to think about PK and not feel any pain at all. He would just be grateful for the time they'd had together, and more grateful that PK was happy and thriving without him.

He wasn't at that point yet, but maybe he could get there one day.

Before that could happen, he still had to come clean to PK.

All Carey had to do was let PK know he was okay, absolve him of whatever obligation he felt to keep in contact with Carey's family, to keep searching for him. Then PK could put that chapter of his life behind him and be free of all the pain that Carey had wrought.

He couldn't see PK in person again. If he'd reacted so poorly just to hearing PK's voice speaking with his girlfriend, he didn't want to imagine what a mess he would be if he had to say it all to PK's face. Carey wanted the best for PK, but he wasn't a saint.

He would save himself the humiliation and say what he wanted in a letter, explaining everything that had happened, why he'd left Montreal and how PK had done more than enough trying to help him.

And then he'd wish PK well, and that would be the end of it.

~~~

"Are you starting a novel or something?"

Carey didn't flinch, which was an improvement on his anxiety of late, but he still hadn't heard Ben come in. He hastily flipped his notepad shut, glad that he'd been careful enough not to scrap his previous letter attempts in a work trash can where one of his nosy coworkers might find it.

"You're late," he said, choosing to ignore Ben's question.

The look Ben gave him said that he knew exactly what Carey was doing, but he rolled his eyes fondly afterwards, so Carey figured he'd been forgiven.

"I'm not that late, it's only ten minutes. My neighbor's dog got loose again, I had to escort him back home."

There was a dog in Ben's neighborhood that had an awful habit of somehow escaping his yard and coming to visit Ben at least once a week, usually when Ben was going for his morning jog before work. Even though none of them but Ben had ever met Max, which was the name on the dog's tag, he'd become a popular topic of conversation at Herb's Electronics, especially once Ben started showing them photos.

Kuzya in particular was a very big fan of Max, and had gone the extra step to print out his photo and stick it to the wall behind the counter with a big red heart drawn around it and some sort of caption written in Russian. It was more aesthetically pleasing than James's grainy black and white  _Employee of the Month_  photos, to be sure.

Carey was just thankful for the distraction.

"So was the owner finally home?"

He could tell from Ben's face what the answer would be, but he still patted his back indulgently while he groaned and slumped in defeat, tapping his forehead against Carey's shoulder.

"No, oh my God. I've left him  _so many notes_  and he never does anything! He leaves Max out in the yard all day, and Max gets bored and hops the fence to come run with me, and you know I don't mind it, but-"

"But we can't guarantee that everyone else will be so kind or that Max will always get home safely," Carey finished.

" _Exactly_. I mean, I put him back inside the fence, and I left a note on his collar  _and_  on the front door, but what the hell am I supposed to do? It's bad enough to leave him out in the yard unattended all day, but when you know he makes a habit of jumping the fence and you don't change anything? Who  _does_  that?"

Paul pushed through the door to the kitchen carrying a tray of Dutch chocolate muffins to set in the display case. "Max get loose again?"

It wasn't clear if he'd heard the conversation, but if Ben was late it was as good a guess as any.

That was enough to get Ben going again, trailing after Paul as he returned to the kitchen. "He's such a smart dog, his owner should know better!"

The door swung shut behind them, and Carey felt safe to open up his notepad again. Technically he wasn't alone in the front, but he didn't think that the woman helping her three year old granddaughter color in a picture of a frog near the windows was paying his angst any mind.

He'd spent all morning drafting his letter to PK. If page after page of scribbled out words meant anything, it hadn't been going well.

It was hard to write a goodbye letter to the man you were in love with, especially when you were only just finally telling him everything you should have told him two years ago.

Explaining about what happened in Montreal was the easy part. It was concrete, cut and dry, factual. He was able to present what had transpired, how he'd reacted, and why he'd left Montreal without a word.

He made a point of saying that he didn't blame PK for anything, and he didn't want him going after the Habs. It was too little, too late now anyways, and PK didn't need that sort of press.

In none of his drafts did he tell PK where he'd actually been the past two years. There were some lines he couldn't cross, and telling PK that he was nearby was one of them. It had been different before, when he'd had reason to fear that PK would find him. Now that he knew that PK was moving on, and that he'd given up trying to meet the morning barista, his primary concern was making sure that PK didn't start looking for him again – any version of him.

He only wanted to lay out the basic facts: that he was safe, that he had found a job and a place to live right away so he hadn't been suffering, that his family knew he was okay.

Carey only wanted to tell the truth, and so he didn't go so far as to say he was happy.

He also didn't want PK to worry, and so he was careful about choosing what parts of the truth to tell.

His newfound inability to cope with his general existence wouldn't be featuring in the letter. That would do the exact opposite of convincing PK that he didn't need to worry.

That was the difficult part, trying to think up the best way to tell PK that he was glad he'd moved on, glad he was happy in a new relationship with a new team in a new city now, that he wished him all of the happiness in the world and part of that happiness meant making sure he didn't worry about Carey anymore – and that part of not worrying about Carey meant that he couldn't know where Carey was, so that he wouldn't be tempted to ruin what he had now.

It had to sound genuine. Carey truly did mean it with everything he had – all he'd ever wanted all these years was for PK to be happy – but trying to express it in writing without PK reading too much into it, thinking he was saying one thing but feeling differently...it was hard, trying to force someone to react a certain way through words alone.

Especially when you didn't even have the words to speak to them face-to-face.

In the end, he finally gave in and did what he should have done from the start.

"Is he happy?"

He barely let the door to James's office close before he spoke.

James blinked up at him, his expression vacant while he turned the words over in his head. Carey could pinpoint the exact moment he realized exactly which  _he_  they were referring to.

"Uh...I mean, I never knew him before, and I've only met him like, once outside of the shop, but...yeah, he seems like he is."

Carey crossed his arms, examined his shoes. There was a spot of coffee grounds on the toe of his work boots.

"But is he happy with her?"

There would never be a time when Carey wasn't grateful that James didn't question his motives, didn't search his tone for pettiness or question if it was really in his best interest to be asking these things.

He took the question at face value, biting his lip in thought.

After a moment of quiet deliberation, he nodded.

"I think so," he said, voice soft, subdued. "I don't think they've been together too long – at least, they met when he came to Nashville. Her name's Elena, she's some sort of teacher. Elementary school, I think. People were commenting how cool it would be that they would both have the summer off."

Carey was even more thankful that James didn't verbalize the added connotation of what it would mean for PK and Elena to still be together come next summer to spend that time off together.

James didn't wait for Carey to respond. Maybe he didn't expect him to.

"She's pretty nice. They seem to really like each other."

Carey nodded. He muttered to the stain on his boot, "She is nice."

They would be a good fit, not just because their schedules matched up. She was beautiful, and kind, and she liked kids, just like PK. They were both happy, smiling people, who were probably honest about their feelings and would never consider abandoning each other without explanation, even if they thought it was for the best.

They could make each other happy. That was all Carey really needed to know.

He turned to leave James's office, stopping with his hand on the doorknob when James asked, "Hey, are you doing okay? Do you want to stay over for dinner tonight?"

They both knew that this would mean James was actually inviting him to have dinner at Paul's place, because the most James cooked for dinner were frozen pizzas, but Carey didn't bother to make the usual joke.

"Not tonight. I've got...I have some things I have to settle, and then I'll be okay."

Once he sent the letter, everything would be done, and they could all move on.

Carey wasn't sure exactly what or where he was moving on to, but it had to be better than feeling like this.

"Okay, I guess. Just, take care of yourself, eh?"

"Yeah, of course."

He ignored the look Ben gave him as he left James's office.

~~~

That night, he sealed his letter in an envelope addressed to PK. He didn't add a return address. Then he placed it in a larger envelope and sent it to his sister, who had agreed to send it from Anahim Lake. If PK was really still concerned about tracking down Carey, he might call up his parents when he saw where the letter was posted from, but he would give up when he realized that Carey wasn't there.

And then, they would all be free.

~~~

Some part of Carey was waiting for the other shoe to drop, like there would be some sign from the universe that told him that PK had read his letter and understood why he'd left and was able to move on and focus entirely on his new relationship now that he had closure.

As the days ticked into weeks without any change, it started to settle in that perhaps nothing would. If his plan had gone the way it was supposed to, nothing in Carey's life would be different. Unless PK felt like baring his soul to his teammates, there wouldn't be any gossip via James about what he'd thought.

All Carey could do was accept that he would never know, and try to move on from there.

He was still a little disappointed when the next time he called his mother, she mentioned nothing about having heard from PK. She probably wouldn't hear from him again, now that he had no reason to call.

Life was...startlingly normal. Carey had forgotten what it had been like before PK came to town and Carey started marking his shifts by the manner in which he had to hide from his ex.

The days blended together into benign monotony. Carey served a truly horrifying number of pumpkin-based drinks. Kuzya pretended not to speak English every time a customer was upset about receiving a weagle latte. Ben had to return his neighbor's dog at least twice a week. Paul debuted some sort of new caramel apple muffins that sold out within minutes every time they put out a new batch. James loudly deliberated over if he should move in with his exceedingly wealthy professional hockey player boyfriend or continue living in a depressingly bare apartment above his place of work while mooching all of his meals off his best friend.

Everything was just fine, and Carey was bored to tears.

"I'm thinking about moving home," he told Ben one day over lunch.

He didn't think it was that big of a deal, but Ben actually stopped chewing, sub forgotten in his hands, staring at him like he'd just announced that he was thinking of taking up interpretive dance.

" _Home?_ "

Carey hadn't known Ben's voice could get that high.

"What do you mean by home? Home like, you're thinking of  _getting_  a home? Or home, like back to Montreal?"

Carey shook his head. "Not Montreal."

Never again Montreal. Even if the team and the city held nothing over him anymore, he still couldn't stomach the thought of returning there. Especially not when the most important thing in Montreal wasn't even there anymore.

"Then what? British Columbia?" Ben said it the way that most people would say "rectal exam."

Carey snorted and refrained from telling Ben that he felt the same way about Missouri. "Try not to make it sound too awesome. Yes, British Columbia. That's where my family is, that's where I grew up."

There wasn't a lot of work in Anahim Lake that didn't involve farming or foresting, but that was okay. Generations of his ancestors had lived their lives off of the land; it wouldn't be a hardship for him to do the same.

It would have nothing to do with his education, but then again, neither did serving coffee. And unlike remaining in Nashville, it would have absolutely no chance of Carey's life intersecting with those of professional hockey players.

Maybe it wouldn't be thrilling, but it would be home, with his family there. Going back might help him move forward with his life.

Ben was still staring at him like he'd lost his mind.

"But why?"

Carey raised an eyebrow. "It's not like I intended to be a barista for the rest of my life."

Ben flushed to the tips of his ears. "Well, no, I didn't mean – it's not like I expected that. But you'd really want to do that, go all the way back to your tiny hometown in the middle of nowhere with, what, twenty other people in it?"

"It's not  _that_  small-"

"Okay, twenty-five people, whatever. You'd still want to do that?"

Carey shrugged. "It's...it's home. I don't have a whole lot keeping me here, or anywhere, really, except for my family in BC."

He didn't really know how to read the look on Ben's face, a cross between a wince and a frown.

"You have a life here," Ben said quietly, like he thought Carey might contest him. "I mean, you've got the shop, and James and Paul and Kuzy. You have me."

Carey started to scoff, ready to remark that Ben had just exemplified how little he had here, how his life in Nashville wasn't worth much.

But Ben was looking down at his sandwich like it held all of the answers that Carey wasn't explaining, or like doing so would keep him from having to see Carey shoot him down, just the way he'd been planning.

Ben didn't know about PK. He didn't know what Carey was running from, or how PK's trade had turned his whole life upside down in so many ways.

He just knew that Carey was like him, like James and Paul and maybe Kuzya too, someone who'd turned up at a weird bakery in Nashville because it was as good a place as any to start his life over with people who wouldn't ever force him to say what was so wrong with his life that he'd needed a do-over.

Carey didn't know what Ben was running from, but there was probably a reason why he wouldn't, or couldn't, go back.

And to someone who had found solace and friendship and a fresh start in the strangest of places, the idea of someone abandoning that to go  _back_  would be a slap in the face.

Carey bit back his response and jerkily nodded.

"You're right," he said softly, "I do have you guys. And that counts for more than you know. I don't know where I'd be right now without you guys."

"Suffering at Starbucks making drinks with 'frap' in the name," Ben supplied eagerly. His smile was quick and warm; Carey had said the right thing.

Carey smiled back and changed the topic to James's love life, which was far more entertaining.

But the next time his sister brought up the idea of him moving back home, he told her he wasn't so sure anymore.

"I have a good thing going here," he said. "Even without PK. I think I could make a life here. Or maybe I already have."

Maybe he was a little slow on the uptake, because his sister didn't even sound surprised.

"But Carey," she said, "Are you sure you want to miss out on a thrilling life of rodeos and cattle drives?"

"I mean, I  _am_  in Tennessee, I'm pretty sure they have all of those things down here."

"Exactly, I'm thinking maybe we should all just move down there, it's just like home but people actually want to live there."

They both laughed, and they bounced around the idea of everyone coming down to see Carey for Christmas, "to give it a test run."

It wasn't where he'd grown up, and it wasn't where his family lived, but maybe Nashville could be his home now. It already had been, for the past two years.

The city contained over half a million people. Surely it was big enough for both him and PK.

~~~

The stupidest thing was that when it finally happened, Carey absolutely was not expecting it.

It was November, the week before American Thanksgiving. The bakery was swimming with specialty pie orders and the kitchen perpetually smelled like pumpkin and apples. Carey was still serving way too many drinks with pumpkin spice in them, and was counting down the days until they switched over to peppermint just to get some variety in his life.

Carey's shift had actually just ended, but Ben was still putting the top crusts on some pies that they were freezing for customers to bake at home. While he waited for Ben to finish so they could go to lunch, Carey was hanging out behind the front counter, proofreading one of Kuzya's papers. It was for some sort of advanced economics class, so Carey knew fuck-all what it was about, but he could at least check it over for grammar errors.

"You used the wrong conjugation here," he said. He picked up his pen to underline it as the bell over the door rang. "You want to say that the rates of inflation  _increase_ , not increases. The verb is tied to 'rates,' which is plural."

Kuzya muttered something in Russian that was undoubtedly disparaging of both Carey and the entirety of the English language, but he leaned over Carey's shoulder to see what he was pointing to all the same.

"I hate English," he grumbled. "They say, you want plural, add  _s_! No, don't add  _s_ , no  _s_  for plural! In Russia we do not have this problem."

"Yeah, but you also have like, two words for blue," Carey said, just to piss him off.

"They're different colors!" Kuzya squawked.

"Carey?"

He would never admit that it took his brain a few moments to recognize why that voice was familiar. In his defense, he hadn't heard it say his name in two years.

When he looked up, PK was standing just inside the door, like he'd stopped mid-step, staring like he'd seen a ghost. To be fair, that might be expected when you suddenly discovered your runaway ex-boyfriend in another country from where he'd disappeared.

Carey was unwittingly brought back to that moment on the porch of PK's house, because just like then, he'd imagined this scenario so many times and yet he still hadn't expected this to happen.

He stared right back. Every word he'd ever thought about saying fled him, and all he was left with was a feeling of complete and utter shock, crossed with no small amount of fear.

This was the moment he'd been thinking about for over two years. He had no way of predicting how PK would react. The ball was in his court.

"Carey," PK breathed. He took a slow step forward, like Carey was a spooked animal who might try to run – or like he might disappear if PK wasn't careful.

Either felt possible.

Carey had to force himself not to take a step back.

"Oh, you finally meet?" Kuzya elbowed Carey. By now everyone knew about James and Carey's campaign to keep Carey from meeting PK Subban, even if they didn't know the reason behind it.

He may as well not have spoken, because PK didn't hear him. His eyes were only for Carey – and damn him, but Carey couldn't move, not with those eyes boring into him, pinning him in place as PK took another step closer.

"Carey, what are you doing here?"

His mouth opened, but no words came out. There were so many things he could say, so many ways this could go, but he didn't know which one was right, which one would make PK smile, would make him understand, would keep him from turning around and leaving right now.

He didn't have to say anything. PK's gaze landed on his apron, the one that he stupidly hadn't removed yet because he'd figured he'd charge James for the extra fifteen minutes he had to spend waiting around for Ben to finish up. Specifically, he was staring at Carey's nametag, that stupid old nametag he'd never bothered to correct.

PK's eyes lit in understanding. When he spoke, it was almost like he was laughing, but his voice was flat.

"SCarey," he read, huffing in bland amusement. "You're Scary."

He must have realized, then, exactly why the morning barista was always avoiding him, why he was always disappearing just as PK happened to walk in, why just about every Nashville Predator had been able to meet him but PK.

Something in the pit of Carey's stomach wanted to wither up and die in that moment.

His chest started to grow tight, and fuck, no, he couldn't do that right now.

He shoved the feelings down and nodded sharply, still unable to form the right words to express to PK just how remorseful he was.

PK took another step forward.

"And you've been here all this time?"

Carey's face felt hot, his neck, his ears.

He nodded.

He would forever be mortified by the way he flinched when Kuzya pressed up against his side, his mouth right next to Carey's ear.

"You okay?" he asked lowly. "You need me to get Ben? Paulie?"

Carey shook his head sharply. Fuck, that was the last thing he needed, to have them all watch his humiliation.

His voice was embarrassingly hoarse when he said, "No, could you – could you give us a minute, please?"

He didn't need to see Kuzya's face to know that that was the exact opposite of what he wanted to be doing, but for once in his life he actually listened and complied. Carey would have been flattered by the suspicious look he cast PK if it weren't for the sick feeling in his stomach when they were finally alone together.

They stared at each other, finally face to face for the first time in over two years. Carey knew what PK looked like, obviously – he'd seen the videos, he knew he hadn't changed a bit.

But the way PK stared at him, eyes hungrily roving over his face, drinking him in – maybe Carey had changed more than he thought.

He winced. Yet another thing to apologize for.

"I got your letter." PK's voice was heartbreakingly soft, but it felt as loud as a gunshot. Carey was glad of the counter between them, fingers digging into the surface like it could somehow defend him from what he deserved.

"I'm sorry," he gasped. He didn't know what to say, but that was as good a place as any to start.

He had so much to be sorry for.

PK was frowning, and that only made things worse.

"Carey, Carey, no," he said. Every word felt like a nail in his chest, deep and painful.

"I'm sorry," he said again. "I- I'm so sorry, for everything, I- fuck, PK, I'm so sorry."

And then, instead of shouting or scoffing or rolling his eyes, PK smiled at him, small and genuine and so soft it hurt.

"Carey. Will you please shut up for a moment and come over here so I can hug you?"

And that – Carey didn't know what to do with that, hadn't expected that, hadn't planned for it. He crept around the counter in a daze, more to make PK happy than because he actually realized what he was doing. He felt for a moment like his body wasn't his own, and then PK took those last steps forward to grab Carey by the shoulders and yank him into his arms, and Carey was forcefully snapped back to reality.

PK smelled the same, was the first thing his delirious mind noticed. It wasn't unusual – hockey players were creatures of habit, and were very unlikely to change their shower products or cologne once they found what they liked – but it still stood out, because that familiar scent was logged in Carey's mind as so very, very PK.

The second thing he noticed was that PK was holding him tight enough to bruise, one arm wrapped crushingly tight around his back, fingers clenching in his shirt, while the other cradled his head and pulled it down against his shoulder, gentle but inexorable.

The third was that PK was shaking, or maybe they both were, and the next thing he knew there were hot tears dripping down the side of his neck, and PK's absolutely wrecked voice was whispering, " _Fuck_ , Carey, I was so scared. I missed you so much."

"I'm sorry," he offered again. He felt like an ass, knowing that it was nowhere near enough to make amends for what he'd done, but that didn't stop him from clutching PK back just as tightly, taking what he could get for the short time that he had it.

PK huffed against his neck. It sounded concerningly watery.

"Stop apologizing. Just let me..."

He never finished his statement, just held Carey tight like he'd disappear if he even thought about loosening his grip. Slowly, carefully, he smoothed his fingers over Carey's hair, fingers trailing down the nape of his neck. It was delicate, hesitant, and Carey felt like his heart was going to pound right out of his chest.

Another apology was on the tip of his tongue, because no matter what PK said, he absolutely had to apologize, but then PK started speaking again.

"I got your letter. I recognized your handwriting on the envelope, the way you wrote my name...fuck, Carey, I almost had a heart attack – don't you dare fucking apologize to me again, Price, I'm talking."

Carey's mouth snapped shut. PK gently squeezed the back of his neck before smoothing his hand over Carey's hair again.

"I must have read it...fuck, I don't know how many times. When I first read it, I was so mad."

Carey couldn't help the way he stiffened up, tried to pull away, to take a step back. PK made a soft sound of complaint and refused to let him move, tugging him right back where he'd had him.

"Not at you, baby, never at you. At Montreal. At my own fucking team ruining your life just because we loved each other. I was livid for weeks – I still am. I know it might seem like it's not worth it now to go after them, now that their fucking  _contract_  is invalid, but I will gladly let everyone drag my name through the mud if it means getting you justice."

This time when Carey tried to pull back, PK let him move, but only just enough that they could see each other's faces. He still had his arms firmly wrapped around Carey and seemed strangely disinclined to move any time soon.

"Don't do that for me," Carey said lowly, swallowing against the lump in his throat. "I'm not worth it, I-"

"Carey Price, you are worth every fucking dollar I have and then some. If Don Cherry thinks I have a bad reputation now, I would gladly play fucking hopscotch on my reputation if it meant helping you."

This wasn't...Carey hadn't planned for this. It didn't make sense. PK was acting like Carey was the victim, and maybe he had been, once upon a time, but he'd been more than complicit in all of this. He was the one who'd left. He was the one who'd abandoned PK with nothing but a text, he was the one who'd run away, he was the one who'd actively avoided him when he came to Nashville.

He started to shake his head again, but PK clenched his fingers in Carey's hair, pulling tight and keeping his head still.

"Don't you disagree with me, Pricey, you won't change my mind."

"But I  _left_  you!" Carey protested. He knew he should keep his mouth shut, but the words that had been bubbling up in his throat burst out and there was no stopping them. "I ran off and dumped you with a  _text message_ , and you spent years worrying about me when I was just here, living as a fucking  _barista_  in Nashville. I don't – I don't deserve any of that. I'm lucky you're even willing to talk to me."

In many scenarios Carey had imagined, they never made it this far because PK turned around and walked away and Carey never saw him again. This was already far surpassing even his brightest of fantasies.

But PK was shaking his head again, like Carey was an idiot but he was still fond of him anyway.

"There will never be a day that I don't want to talk to you. Fuck, I spent the last two years wanting to talk to you. I can't tell you how many times I'd turn to say something, but you weren't there. Or I'd want to share something with you, and then I'd remember that you were gone. There are a bunch of boxes at my house that are literally just full of things I bought for you because I wanted you to have them and I told myself that I'd give them all to you when I found you. By the way, I also bought you a house. It's got a big Southern porch like you always wanted, and a big enough yard to get a dog. It doesn't have land like you're used to back home, but I figured we could move to the country after I retired if you wanted."

Carey had to pull away from PK at that, shaking his head, wrenching himself backwards and stumbling further when PK reached for him, looking hurt.

Because he'd seen that house, and it may have been everything that Carey had said he wanted, but he knew for a fact that that house was not for him, just as he knew with painful clarity that PK was not for him.

"You have a girlfriend," he said, feeling like his own words were flaying him alive. "I know – I saw her, I delivered your order. I went to, to see you, to say I was sorry, and I met her, and that's why I wrote you a letter, because I didn't want to, to interfere."

Something in PK's face crumpled, and Carey felt a little like he was crumpling too.

"That's why you...fuck, baby, no, I... I didn't want to cheat on you-"

Fucking Christ.

Carey paced away a few steps, rubbing a hand over his face, trying to pull himself together before he flew apart into a million shattered, irreparable pieces.

"PK," he said shakily, trying to forcibly maintain his composure, "I broke up with you two years ago, by text. It's not cheating on someone when they literally fled the country to break up with you  _two years ago_."

He knew it was cruel, to word it the way he did, but he needed PK to understand the severity of what he'd done, how undeserving he was of PK's forgiveness, of his affection, of this, this, whatever this was.

But PK didn't flinch the way he might have expected. He just shook his head with a small, sad smile. He started to take a step towards Carey, and then, seeming to think better of it, stayed where he was.

"You had to know I wouldn't believe it," PK said. He spread his arms out as if inviting Carey to see his point of view. "Your long-term boyfriend quits his job, packs up his shit and disappears without a trace, without even his family knowing what happened to him, and breaks up with you in a text. Do you think you'd believe he did it because he didn't want to be in a relationship anymore? Fuck, Carey, it was so sketchy I wanted to get the police involved, until your dad convinced me not to. He said that as long as you kept calling to check in, they were going to respect your wishes, even if they disagreed with what you were doing. But none of us ever believed that you ran off because you wanted to. You loved your job, and I know you loved me. I knew you wouldn't have left if you didn't have to."

He said it so calmly, like it was rehearsed – like it was something he'd told himself over and over in the weeks and months and years since Carey had left.

He said it like he believed it.

That still didn't explain things, though.

"Even then, I'd been gone for over two years. You're allowed to move on from someone who hasn't spoken to you in two years, PK."

PK made a face then, the scrunched up uncomfortable one he always made when he was trying and failing to hide embarrassment.

"Well, yeah. I know. Everyone kept telling me I had to get back into the game, and I thought that maybe I could give things a try. Elena's friends with the wife of one of the guys on the team, and we got along great, but she decided we should end things when I got your letter."

Carey closed his eyes, softly hissing under his breath,  _"Fuck_. That was why I sent a letter in the first place, to keep that from happening!"

But PK didn't seem nearly as upset as he probably should have. In fact, he actually looked a little amused.

"Babe, you weren't the reason we broke up. It was more like I talked about you all the time, and have pictures of you all over my house – a house that I picked out with you in mind – and the way I reacted to that letter was just the last nail in the coffin. She said that she liked me, but it was clear that I was still hung up on you. Honestly, I had to agree, because after I got your letter my mom had to convince me not to put up a video begging you to come home."

Carey didn't mean to flinch, but those words were everything he'd been rolling around in his head for weeks now, everything he'd told himself he'd had wrong.

"That's what my parents said, when they gave me your address. That you wanted me to have it in case I wanted to come home."

PK stepped closer, a smile growing on his face.

"I meant it. I still mean it. I always want you to know where you can find me, so no matter what happens between us, you know you have a place to come home to."

He was close enough to touch again, and he did, placing a warm hand on Carey's cheek.

"That's what you were trying to do when you came by the house, wasn't it? You wanted to come home."

The question was intimate, tender, and even giving just the briefest of nods made Carey feel vulnerable and exposed.

It was worth it, though, to see how PK's face lit up, his smile bright enough to make something in Carey's heart feel like it was breaking in the best possible way.

"I got you, Pricey," he said, pulling Carey's face down to his. "You're home now."

There weren't any fireworks when their lips met. It was a soft, gentle thing, the warm familiarity of a favorite book and the smell of your mom's cooking. It was relearning each other, slow and shy, and a long-awaited reunion.

It was coming home.

PK moved to deepen the kiss, sliding a hand back into Carey's hair, when voices and the sounds of a scuffle drifted through the kitchen door just before it was pushed open by Ben.

"Look, I don't know what you two are talking about-" His voice broke off when he spotted Carey and PK still wrapped up in one another. Ben's face flushed red, and his eyes...Carey had to look away.

"Oh," he heard Ben say quietly. "I, uh...sorry. I guess we're skipping lunch today. I'll, um..."

He didn't finish the sentence, just turned and shoved back through the door. PK snickered quietly, pressing his smile into Carey's neck.

"I guess we should get out of here," he murmured. "If a kiss is enough to scar your coworkers, they really won't want to see all of the other things I want to do to you."

Carey squinted at him in disbelief. "You really want to take me back. After all of that. After everything I did, you want to get back together, just like that. It can't be that easy."

He had clearly been away from PK for too long, because he didn't see it coming at all, even when PK's grin turned ten different kinds of shit-eating.

"Baby," he said, "You know I'm always easy for you."

Fuck it, but Carey loved that idiot.

"Come on," he said, grabbing PK by the hand and tugging him towards the door. "I hear you bought me a house. I'd like to see it properly."

PK grinned and squeezed his hand. " _Demanding_ ," he tsked.

Carey gave him a half-smile and held the door open for him.

"I'm just ready to go home."

When PK squeezed his hand again, he felt like he already had.

**Author's Note:**

> Catch me over at [swedishgoaliemafia on Tumblr](https://swedishgoaliemafia.tumblr.com/)!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] What You See, You Might Not Get by McSpot](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15089585) by [Hellspot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hellspot/pseuds/Hellspot)




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